The Crimson Court Correspondences
by Rakked
Summary: A continuation of my Darkest Dungeon Diaries, following the events of the Darkest Dungeon missions and pressing on into the Crimson Court DLC. One or more in-character diary entries per in-game week.
1. The Heiress Arrives

**_Week 69 – Miron, Antiquarian_**

 _To: My Learned Correspondent:_

 _Dear sir,_

 _I was overjoyed to receive your communication. I apologize for my delay in responding; I have been several days on a mission into the darker thickets of the Weald in search of medicines from a waylaid trader._

 _Please accept my deepest gratitude for speaking with the Duke on my behalf. I gather from your letter that he is inclined to bend from his previous inflexible position, and I lay the credit for that entirely at your laudable feet. I trust the historically and mystically suggestive etchings enclosed will more than compensate you for your efforts._

 _The Heir to this place is dead. He slashed his own throat while I was lurking in the Weald, not that anyone cares very much. Bosc and Mathan and some of the others have been keeping a certain amount of order, although I have found the chaos somewhat advantageous vis-à-vis my purse._

 _I will send out some feelers to determine if the next Heir will actually come to the Hamlet or not. With any luck, and thanks to your help, I will be gone long before then!_

 _Your Correspondent,_

 _Miron._

* * *

 ** _Week 70 – Medley, Vestal_**

 _Dear Diary,_

 _I give daily thanks to the Light and Her beneficence for my excommunication._

 _The Church misunderstands so much. They parade their piety and jaw on endlessly about service and sacrifice, but they are so peculiarly unable to see past their noses when they look at the Versebook! Mother Superior accused me of falling into the Travesian error. Error! Nonsense. How can one look at the Verses, written so far apart in time by different authors and yet so perfectly concordant, and not see the guiding mind of a single, personal being?_

 _"Over-anthropomorphizing" my eye. The Light laughs at them, I am sure, just as I am sure She watches over me._

 _At any rate, excommunication is the best thing that ever happened to me. This Hamlet is dismal and strange and beset by monsters and madness, but that only means more opportunities to spread the true word of the Light._

 _No one is really in command at the moment, although there is a great deal of respect for some few. A prayerful but rough man called Dismas organized a group of us to rout out a band of undead beasts from the Ruins. One of my companions was a strange Eastern woman named Aljarhaa. She was missing a hand, but was no less dangerous for it – as the creatures that fell before her spear could attest._

 _I believe that she is a sorceress. She does strange dances and calls up snakelike shadows to attack our foes. I strongly suspect that she had something to do with the nightmarish serpent-demons that attacked us in the night. Something about the haunted look in her eyes, though, tells me that it is not truly her fault, so I am willing to bear the attacks._

 _I've been too candid, I'm sure, but I will keep this diary secret and safe._

 _Medley, in service to the True Light and Her Glory._

(The Travesian error is a minor heresy involving anthropomorphizing the Light, first mentioned way back in the Darkest Dungeon Diaries, Chapter 5.)

* * *

 ** _Week 71 – The Heiress_**

Wilhelmina Constantine von W-, Heiress and Lady of the Hamlet: Her Diary.

 _The disorganization apparent from even a cursory examination of this place is appalling. I don't know what deeply, deeply hidden gifts my cousin may have had, but management was_ not _one of them. And apparently the two who had been keeping everything running, Raoullin and Pevrel, died in battle several weeks ago._

 _So for almost a month, the only check on the ridiculous and dangerous collection of mercenaries, barbarians, occultists, and abominations that my cousin collected have been an ex-robber named Dismas, a few retired lawmen, and the willingness of a few of the warriors to enforce the dictates of the frankly useless local constabulary._

 _When I arrived, a motley group was just returning from an expedition to my Weald, loaded with loot, heirlooms, and other valuables, which they just… dumped in front of the constables' office, taking their pay from the more liquid commodities without receipts or records of any kind. And the group! There was a half-naked woman wrapped in chains and a shifty-looking Eastern sorcerer who I am almost sure I saw secreting some additional valuables about his person. I never saw such a bizarre pack of reprobates._

 _Things are going to be tightened up considerably around here, I can assure you. I've had several conferences with the most respected of my cousin's mercenaries, and they and the rest are hungry for proper leadership. I've called a meeting of the lot of them in the town square later today, and I intend to let them know that particular need is about to be met, in spades._

 _Maybe we can do something about these damned mosquitoes, too._

 _Lady W., Heiress._

* * *

 ** _Week 72 – Craon, Librarian_**

 _Dear Diary,_

 _Everyone in this town is insane. Balmy. Utterly loony._

 _I must have been sent here by mistake. I don't understand it, I was just going to pick up some rare volumes from a manor library, but there was an error in the records and the manor's burned down and I don't understand these people, and when I went to the Lady to sort it out I think she thought I was one of her mercenaries because she skewered me with those incredible eyes of hers and ordered me out on a mission, and I froze. I just froze!_

 _And I went. And then I spent days slogging through some hideous beach beating off fish-monsters with my books and tending to wounds and generally trying to buck up my compatriots. Don't even get me started on them! I'm pretty sure one of them is some sort of snake-worshipper. And one has a falcon that makes me nervous. I'm allergic to feathers._

 _Pancevolt's nice, though. A very clever sorcerer from the East. I like him. We talked about the_ Rubaiyat _one night, and hearing him recite those poems in his own tongue was delightful._

 _I must try to ask the Lady about those books soon, so I can leave. But the pay from that few days was more than my stipend for an entire semester at the university. It might be worth staying around for a few weeks…_

 _Craon._

* * *

 ** _Week 73 – Bosc, Plague Doctor_**

 _Words cannot express the relief I feel._

 _The Lady W. is educated as well as one can expect for an aristocrat, and she is making the most of a bad situation with commendable force. Expeditions are going out against the monsters that infest the surroundings with more regularity and direction than ever before. She also had a talk with the constabulary that seemed to put some vinegar into them, and the Hamlet is quieting down at long last._

 _I had thought this place was a mess before the Heir expired, but the weeks of anarchy that followed made the former chaos seem almost comforting. Mathan, Bellecote, Bossard and Dismas have all done their best, and Gwenllian and Von Kalmbach have been ready enough to bludgeon the worst elements into submission, but it has been difficult to be productive with hooligans rampaging around the streets day and night._

 _Now, at last, my researches continue. I have written often about the strange aspects to many of the diseases here, and with a firm hand on the tiller I'll be able to expect some more cooperation._

 _Speaking of diseases and the frequently-diseased, Dismas is finally shaking off the weight of what he saw and did down in the dark. Light knows it took me long enough when I came back._

 _I am, I must admit, rather glad that he is well._

 _Bosc, Dr. Md., physician._


	2. The Court and the Serpent

**_Week 74 – Pettiloup, Falconer_**

 _I can hardly believe it. The Vvulf is dead._

 _Somehow I never expected anyone to actually beat him. I thought he'd just slink off into the wilderness when he got too old and battered to lead anymore. I always assumed I'd get a chance to track him down and kill him when that happened, but I guess the Light had other ideas._

 _It was almost half a year ago. Only one of those actually present is still alive – a Vestal named Roussel, and Vestals haven't, in my experience, been particularly quick to befriend lean, tattered brigands like myself. So I haven't heard much about how it was done. But I saw that ghoulish wolf-tail tassel of his hanging up in the Tavern, and I know he'd never part with that if he was alive._

 _So he must be dead. And now I have to decide what else to do with my life. Skulking around bandit lairs wasn't exactly my job of choice. But everything else I've tried has just felt too strange. I've seen and done too much wrong to be a baker's wife and I have too many scars to be a brothel girl._

 _I'm sick of it all anyways. At least here, lurking around weird ruins and killing monsters, I feel a bit useful. And Papillon likes the exercise, and the food._

 _It's something, at least._

 _Pettiloup._

* * *

 ** _Week 75 – The Heiress_**

Wilhelmina Constantine von W-, Heiress and Lady of the Hamlet: Her Diary.

 _I fear I may have done my departed cousin some wrong in my previous writings. After what I have just seen, I feel that surviving for over a year in this place is an accomplishment sufficient to wipe away a great deal of my personal distaste for the man. I knew that there was much of fear and strange horror here, but I admit I had assumed the tales were exaggerated._

 _I was wrong._

 _The horrid swarms of insects that infest the Hamlet seemed to have their nesting ground in a vile swamp not far from the Ruins, so I selected a small group to go with me to investigate and burn down what we could. Hamage and Martel – an old mercenary and a roguish young wench of an archer – seemed competent enough, and I picked a sorcerous hawk from the East named Baudry for his professed and proven expertise in the ancient and arcane._

 _Another was waiting for us outside the gates of the sunken Courtyard. A dogged, bloody-handed lay priest of that half-heretical sect of mortifiers that one sees in the streets sometimes. His presence was to prove fortunate, if unsettling. He insisted that the Light demanded he accompany us, and I praise that beneficent power that I allowed it. He took more blows than I can count that were meant for the rest of us, and I feel that it's only charitable that I assume his bizarre moans were from religious rapture rather than some more worldly sensation._

 _Even now I do not believe half of what I saw. We trudged through a murky, crimson-lit court half-sunk in the swamp, and the fiends that infested it… I do not know how to even describe them. Horrible mockeries of the bedizened fops that swarm the courts, but with a nauseating mutation or some terrible disease that made them swell, and drip, and lunge at our throats, whining and buzzing like insects themselves._

 _I did not faint, but I felt more like it than I have since the last time I wore a corset. We pressed on past all sense, until we had spent our entire supply of torches destroying their disgusting hives. By then, we were all bloody and spent, and there was an unhealthy look to Baudry. He had been borne down by some of the monstrous courtiers, and there were wounds on his neck and blood dripping down his arms before Maynet – the flagellant – whipped them back._

 _I'll have Bosc take a look at him. I need a hot toddy and a series of baths._

 _I cannot help but feel that we have breached a gate to something that will not rest easy._

 _Lady W., Heiress._

* * *

 ** _Week 76 – Couer, Occultist_**

Written in a language of the East.

 _I do not know why I keep up this mummery._

 _I sleep, I stand, I walk. I look around and see my companions. Dismas the thief, Bosc arrogant and reeking of her concoctions, Berners slowly regaining her old frivolity that I despised. They all know. They all went down there. They all_ **saw.**

 _Why do none of them bear the weight of emptiness that I feel? Are they only concealing it?_

 _More of my kinsmen have arrived, so it is not merely the sanctimonious Howard. But all connection I might have felt is gone. They mouth the name of the One Prophet as they practice their wizardry or indulge in serpent magic, and I feel once more the shock of the nothingness in the stars and the ultimate futility of the pitiless void._

 _But why should I fret? We'll all be worms soon enough._

 _Nouh ibn Abdolreza._

* * *

 ** _Week 77 – Bellecote, Houndmaster_**

 _Jean says the nightmares aren't as bad anymore. At least the dog doesn't seem to mind being around at night, and that's something._

 _My father always told me to find a woman who didn't mind if you let the dog sleep in bed on a cold night, and I'll be damned if he wasn't right._

 _The routine's helping. The Abbey helped, and now sticking to the routine. Training the dog while Jean hunts and works with the other fighters, teaches them the little tricks they need in the wild. Helping Mathan with the constable work, then back to Jean._

 _The new Lady's helping, too. Something reassuring about having someone on top who knows what they're doing, or acts like it anyhow. It's almost like being back in the force, except that she's a woman, of course._

 _Jean says I wasn't good for much for close on to a month after that trip._

 _I'm almost glad the Swinefolk are acting up again. The dog and I led a party into the Warrens to rout them out, break their altars and kill their priests, and we did a good job of it._

 _Some damned strange creatures in there, though. Like nothing I'd ever seen before. I'll ask Jean about them._

 _Bellecote._

* * *

 ** _Week 78 – Aljarhaa, Shieldbreaker_**

 _Something is rising in the murk of the swamps. I can feel it coming._

 _I came here to kill my demons – to exorcise the thing that has laid its foul coils upon me. But this land is itself in the grips of a plague even more terrible than the spirits that haunt me. I have seen it in the poison oracles._

 _I sacrificed so much to get here. The long marches, the venom in my veins and the attention of demons. My hand. And now that the dreams led me here to where everything is strange and the things following me become manifest so I can at last slay them, I find myself beset by a hundred other evils just as foul._

 _Is this some dreadful divine joke? Did the One Prophet see this future some dark night centuries ago, and laugh?_

 _I must calm myself. The evil in my arm is acting up again, and must be soothed. There is a ruined Training Ring near the Hamlet. I will go there and perform for the ghosts, and perhaps the serpents will sleep for a time._

 _Halim Aljarhaa._


	3. The Raven

**_Week 79 – Bosc, Plague Doctor_**

 _Four weeks ago, an Easterner named Baudry went with our new Lady to burn out the insect hives that fester in the swampy Courtyard. I have had him under casual observation ever since, after an inspection given at the Lady's request._

 _He was resistant, and appropriately, so has his condition been. It first presented as a fever, which I assumed was contracted from the endless vermin of the marshes, but the past weeks have shown that I was mistaken. He has developed some very interesting symptoms indeed!_

 _There is a shaking in his limbs, and his already gaunt face has grown even more sunken. He has been muttering to himself more than is usual for foreigners. Further, he has shown odd and apparently random fluctuations in his appetite. I have as yet been unable to determine what causes them._

 _I don't exactly_ hope _for this, but perhaps if anyone else becomes infected, I will be able to make more progress. I wonder if the appetite fluctuations will be synchronized?_

 _Bosc, Dr. Md., physician._

* * *

 ** _Week 80 – The Heiress_**

Wilhelmina Constantine von W-, Heiress and Lady of the Hamlet: Her Diary.

 _I came to a realization several days ago. I have spent the last weeks organizing a number of expeditions to scout out what remains of the Ruins near the old manor, in addition to a retributive campaign against the Swine of the Warrens. There were good and sufficient reasons, of course – there are indications that the mad old prophet I've been told about has resurfaced from his apparent death and is badgering the cultists into greater activity, and destroying the profane altars those savages erect is a worthwhile task in and of itself._

 _However, I realized quite suddenly that I was half-intentionally putting off any further explorations of the Courtyard. It was Baudry who sparked that realization. His condition took a sudden turn for the worse, and he began having screaming fits, begging for "the Blood! The Blood!"_

 _Needless to say that reminded me of my previous trip to the swamp. I remember the stacked crates of wine bottles filled with an unpleasantly thick and vibrantly red vintage, and I felt two successive waves of emotion._

 _The first was a chilly, tingling fear spreading through my veins at the thought of that strange and awful place – chattering crowds half-seen through the mist, parasites and monsters leaping out at us, the nightmarish crocodilian lurking in the reeds._

 _The second, of course, was naked fury at my own weakness and the determination that, since the Courtyard had caused this horrid craving in my underling, by heaven the Courtyard would sate that craving!_

 _I brought the fanatic Maynet again, remembering his usefulness and aware that he would likely be coming regardless of what I had to say. Martel and Baudry, as well, since they'd been before and Baudry appeared to be in terrible need, in addition to Elers, my new minstrel, who is as adept with the knife as with the lute._

 _Knowing what was awaiting us, I steeled myself, but I will own that it was still a difficult thing to pass those gates. However, that knowledge enabled us to prepare for what was coming._

 _It was a hard thing, but we prevailed, and my anger was satisfied in the bottles we took away with us. Baudry's thirst, also – temporarily, at least._

 _There is a deep unquiet in my heart. More and more rumors are pouring in from the outlying regions. More sightings of what can only be the insectile inhabitants of that parody of a court._

 _And I have been having dreams. Dreams of my Ancestor as a young man, dancing in the moonlight with a beautiful woman who was also a great, bloated spider-thing._

 _Perhaps it's the absinthe. Or maybe it's just that I'm drinking it alone._

 _Lady W., Heiress._

* * *

 ** _Week 81 – Miron, Antiquarian_**

 _To: My Noble Correspondent:_

 _Your grace,_

 _I was extraordinarily gratified to receive your latest commission, both as a mark of your renewed faith in my loyalty and ability, and as a sign that your displeasure for my previous unfortunate slip of the tongue would not take a more permanent form._

 _I will, as you command, remain in this pit of squalor. I wish to reassure you that I do not mind the stench, the terrible company, the demeaning labor, or the disease and insects one bit if I am furthering your grace's plans by my presence._

 _As our mutual friend at the university may have passed on, the new Heir – or I should say Heiress – has been here for some ten weeks now. It is the Lady von W., with whom you are no doubt acquainted, whose family became entangled with the bloodline of this land by an ill-advised marriage to a by-blow several generations back._

 _Per your commission, I will be watching her closely and reporting if she seems to be engaging in any researches that might be harmful to you. Fortunately on that front, she seems entirely preoccupied with the defense of the Hamlet and surrounds from the monsters that perpetually beset us. Just last week she sent a small party, including myself, to hunt down and slay a certain mystic sea-demon whose enchanted music haunts the Coves. She slipped away into the sea, but en route I discovered a very interesting and illuminating wall carving, a rubbing of which I have enclosed, that shows the family crest but appears to predate any recorded settlement here._

 _Your Correspondent and humble servant,_

 _Miron._

* * *

 ** _Week 82 – Von Kalmbach, Crusader_**

 _Thank the Light, and praise its glorious rays! I never thought I would write this, but after months of being a glorified constable and beating up thieves and the feistier drunks, I actually feel happy to be able to leave the Hamlet and roust monsters out of the Ruins._

 _Maybe it's that we were hunting that gibbering heretic of a prophet. Proper work for a Crusader at last, although it's a bit odd to be going out to slay a heretic with a wizard at your side. But wizardry's less of a sin than heresy, or so the priests say, and they would know. Better an unbeliever than an apostate._

 _Howard's a good enough sort, and he had the sense to keep his hooked nose to himself while Gwenllian and I were beseeching the mercy of the Light for our sins in her tent._

 _I feel good for the first time I can remember. Maybe that prophet will even stay dead this time. We took the bastard's eyes as a trophy, which might help._

 _Who gives a damn about titles anyways._

 _Gottfried von Kalmbach._

* * *

 ** _Week 83 – Fortier, Raven Fiend Abomination_**

 _My name is Fortier. I am a woman. I am human._

 _Thorel said it helped to write it. That must be why he keeps writing even though his hands hurt and shake. Because he has to remind himself that he is a scholar, a learned man, a human._

 _My name is Fortier. I am a woman. I am human._

 _I don't want to write that. I want to write what feels like the truth. My name is Fortier. I am a monster. I am less than human._

 _Inhuman. Abhuman. Subhuman._

 _My name is Fortier. I am a woman. I am human._

 _Please, Light, give me peace. Take this weight from my shoulders._

 _Sometimes I cough up blood and little bones from the things I eat when I am different. I remember in flashes what it's like to have six eyes. My lips hurt because part of me wants to hold them like a beak._

 _I wish I could remember how this happened to me. What I was like before I wandered out of the woods._

 _My name is Fortier. I am a woman. I am human._

 _Was I ever a human?_


	4. Contagion

**_Week 83b – The Heiress_**

Wilhelmina Constantine von W-, Heiress and Lady of the Hamlet: Her Diary.

 _It seems that every week brings some new horror upon us. That mad prophet in the Ruins, some blasphemous piscine witch in the Cove, not to mention the resurgence of Swinefolk attacks. Their grotesque king has returned, and while the farmers may just be farmers, they are_ my _farmers and_ my _responsibility, and I will absolutely not allow their daughters to be snatched away to adorn the kitchen tables of those filthy beasts._

 _I've read in my cousin's records and Pevrel's war journal that Miron, that thieving little spy, once took it upon herself to lead an expedition into the Cove, and first brought back word of the sea witch. I have begun to harbor some suspicious about that. She practically begged to be sent back to investigate when it looked like the witch had returned._

 _That's neither here nor there, though. My efforts to rebuild the Hamlet's ruined districts continue. My cousin had poured considerable funds into the town square area, and now we've reopened the Bank and rebuilt the old Cartographer's Camp. Work proceeds._

 _Lady W., Heiress._

* * *

 ** _Week 84 – Bossard, Bounty Hunter_**

 _Mother,_

 _It has been some months since I wrote to you, and for that I apologize. But it has been a difficult and dangerous time, and I have not felt…_

 _Every time I sat down to write, I seemed to choke on the words. I saw things that I cannot explain and that hurt me in ways I do not understand. But the wounds are healing, slowly. My friend Vatteville has been a great help to me. She writes to her daughter, and she has encouraged me in writing to you. So I sit down, and take up my pen, and this time the words come._

 _I have written before about some of the dangers of this place. I have just returned from a lengthy mission into the maze of Warrens, hunting down and slaughtering the cannibalistic fiends that live and breed there. It is difficult and dirty work, but good for the soul. Seeing their tables loaded with human flesh and their cellars packed with stolen grain makes slaying them a pleasure._

 _I know you do not feel exactly as I do about these things, Mother, but I also know that you understand. The evils that prey upon the weak should be destroyed, and here they exist in plenty. My axe rarely rests for long._

 _I found tracks and carvings that make me believe the Swine King is still living. But we will get him eventually. And their horrible flesh-god has returned as well. Our companion Brèvedent seemed sure of it. She says that she will ask the new Heiress to be sent to search it out. She is very enthusiastic._

 _Your devoted son, Bossard._

* * *

 ** _Week 85 – Bosc, Plague Doctor_**

 _It has been a week of mixed blessings._

 _The Heiress has been incensed. She received some kind of invitation from something styling itself "The Baron" that lives in the swamp-covered Courtyard, and she sent her pet fanatic Maynet and a few other mercenaries to rout him out, but they came back bleeding, drenched, and exhausted without ever having seen him. Loaded with loot, but not in any state to fight for several weeks, unless I miss my guess._

 _More importantly, though, Vernon – a mercenary archer – became infected with the strange illness that has been haunting that Easterner, Baudry. And_ that _is news indeed! Baudry has been going through the fluctuations in condition and appetite that have become normal for him. Periodic administration of the bottled blood the Heiress has stockpiled is keeping him safe and sane – or as sane as any of those wizards are._

 _I've begun recording Vernon's symptoms and patterns alongside Baudry's, and I have hopes of some enlightening data in the coming months. This will be very, very interesting._

 _Bosc, Dr. Md., physician._

* * *

 ** _Week 86 – Von Kalmbach, Crusader_**

 _The things in the Coves have been moving again. We lost another fishing boat, and the Heiress sent Howard, Vatteville and me to punish them._

 _That Easterner girl with the spear and the unpronounceable name came with us. She's very appealing, in an exotic sort of way. I wonder if she's as much of an ascetic as Howard and Couer? That dancer's body of hers says no, unless I miss my guess._

 _There wasn't time for anything like that anyways, what with those nightmarish snakes that beset us in the evening. I've not seen anything like that since purging a nest of serpent-worshippers in the crusade. Brought back memories that were not exactly arousing._

 _Fortunately, I'd brought one of Gwenllian's bottles, so there was something else to do. And then back to slaying fish-things and looting their lairs, and now back to the Hamlet and Gwenllian._

 _Gottfried von Kalmbach._

* * *

 ** _Week 87 – Dismas, Highwayman_**

 _The Shrieker. That was fun._

 _I've had to fight that awful fecking raven-thing before, so I know how to do it. That wasn't the hard part. It was poor Fortier. Devil knows what's wrong with the woman, but a few days ago she went into a weird sort of hysteria, shaking and screeching. Said she was having bad dreams, and something was coming._

 _Then the Shrieker arrived, and she went completely around the bend. Bosc had to drug her to keep her quiet. Had a lot of hush-hush chats with the Heiress, Couer, and Thorel that ended with a pack of us going out to hunt the thing down again._

 _We saw it off as well as we could, and when we got back Bosc tells me Fortier was sleeping quietly. Damned strange._

 _We've all got our little demons, though._

 _I'm glad Berners is seeming more herself lately. And I'm glad Bosc… Well. She helps me feel a bit more sane._

 _Dismas._


	5. Praise and Glory to the Flesh!

**_Week 88 – Fortier, Raven Fiend Abomination_**

 _I had to beg the Heiress to let me go out on a mission, and even then Bosc insisted on coming along to monitor me._

 _They have both seen more of my condition than I would have preferred, no matter how hard I tried to control it. There was something out in the Weald. Something that called to my heart and my blood and bones._

 _I had to get out. It was a punitive expedition, hunting along the old and forgotten paths of the Cove to teach the fishmen not to scuttle our boats and abduct our people._

Our _people. Are they really mine? I don't know. But I need something to hold on to, so why not that?_

 _Bosc is a shrew and a harridan, but she means well. Although she seems to have convinced herself that my case is more or less the same as Thorel's. I do not think so. He has spoken of some kind of alchemy, of something he concocted or prepared that changed him. I remember nothing like that._

 _I remember almost nothing at all._

 _Fortier._

* * *

 ** _Week 89 – Brèvedent, Plague Doctor_**

 _Joy upon joy! I have just returned from an expedition to the Warrens, and once again I am pleased to record –_ I was right. _It lives. It grows and thrives despite all that we did to it!_

 _The small piece I had taken away and kept fed led us straight to it. Obviously I had to keep it concealed from my associates. None of them would have understood. None of them is capable of seeing it the way I see it. The way it truly is._

 _The inchoate, unstable, formless Flesh! The ecstasy of eternal change! The immortal and unnamable essence of life!_

 _They can't see its beauty. You would think that a leper and a woman who digs in graves for a living would be more open-minded. Even its stench is glorious to me, the foetor of a bizarre and changelessly ever-changing life, speaking of chemical processes that I have only just begun to examine._

 _The more I study it – the more I learn – the more I see that this is not the means to an end. The Flesh_ **is** _the end. This must be why I first took up the study of biology. Not so I can use this beautiful creation for fame or wealth or the benefit of mankind, but for the sheer joy of dipping into the infinite well of life that it represents._

 _I had to attack it, of course, or risk all. But I hacked into it with a delicious abandon, feeling the blood and bile spraying over me, secure in the knowledge that no matter what I did to it, it would remain._

 _Countless souls, countless bodies, and life eternal. I crave it with everything that I am._

 _I will learn. I will know. One day I will join it._

 _All praise and glory to the Flesh._

 _Brèvedent._

* * *

 ** _Week 90 – Howard, Occultist_**

 _Nouh,_

 _I write this in the hopes that you will stop your stubborn, mulish silence. We are scholars. We are brother-occultists and kinsmen. Please cease your ridiculous practice of ignoring me when there are important things of which we_ must _speak._

 _You know, I am sure, what I refer to – the girl Aljarhaa. She is cursed._

 _I can hear you say "We are all cursed." That may be, but Aljarhaa bears in her eyes and her severed hand the marks of the al'Afeaa Alshaytan. You have seen the work of that serpent demon before. You must have recognized it in her._

 _I implore you, cousin. Speak with me. I have seen the dream-snakes manifest as she sleeps. This place is strong in dark magic. Here, the beasts can be killed._

 _She may be the first victim of al'Afeaa Alshaytan to have a chance to free herself. She is our coreligionist and countrywoman. We should be helping her. But I need your aid._

 _Your kinsman in the name of the One Prophet._

 _Howard._

* * *

 ** _Week 91 – Bosc, Plague Doctor_**

 _Fortier's case has begun to concern me deeply._

 _The Shrieker, as most of us have come to call the twisted crow-things (or possibly crow-thing?) that occasionally haunt the Weald, returned a mere few days after it had previously been seen off. The effect on Fortier has been… Unpleasant._

 _I have never witnessed Thorel's transformation, but if it is anything like what I saw with Fortier it must be disturbing indeed. Her whole body seemed to stiffen and bulge strangely, her eyes glowing red, feathers sprouting along her skin. She has six eyes in her changed form. Just like the Shrieker._

 _She quieted down at what appears to be the same time the beast was driven away. I did not have to keep her drugged after that, at any rate._

 _I do not yet know how to study this further, but I have retained blood samples from both her "normal" and changed states, and I am optimistic._

 _Bosc, Dr. Md., physician._

* * *

 ** _Week 92 – Berners, Grave Robber_**

 _Dear Diary,_

 _There is something deeply and unsettlingly wrong with Brèvedent._

 _She keeps insisting on coming along on missions against the Swine, although why anyone would_ choose _to go into those slimy, fetid tunnels is utterly beyond my power to comprehend. And she kept sneaking down side corridors and listening at doors tittering while we knocked down those ugly shrines._

 _I'm sure she's looking for something, but damned if I can tell what. I know she was present on both expeditions that encountered that shapeshifting monster that the Swine worship. Perhaps she's merely afraid of that?_

 _If she would take that damnable mask off I would feel a little better. I always get the feeling she's grinning like a lunatic behind it._

 _I suppose we all cope in our own ways, though._

 _Signed, Berners._


	6. Beast and Baron

**_Week 93 – Aljarhaa, Shieldbreaker_**

 _The oracles have failed me. I am lost in the sands._

 _For years, my steps have been guided by their fiery hand. I drank poison and let it purge me from the inside, I clutched snakes to my breast and took their venom into me, and it gave me clarity._

 _And now the poison oracles have lied. They told me where to go. My feet were drawn to that twisted altar, and I knew in my flesh that what lay beyond it would free me._

 _It was a lie. There was a nightmare world, a spinning violet madness of stars, and a thing croaking and moving horribly in the darkness._

 _Who can I trust now? Howard was there. He supported me when the others fell. When that strange man Picvini leapt in front of an attack meant for us. Howard kept me standing so I could plunge my spear into the thing's many eyes and grind it into a disgusting nothingness._

 _Two men are dead. Their names were Picvini and Lynom. I slew the beast and I feel no lifting of this burden. My ruined arm still drips with blight. The snakes still come in the night._

 _Coming here was a mistake, but however the sands blow my destiny is set in stone. I may be blind to what is coming but my own way is clear. I must continue._

 _Halim Aljarhaa._

* * *

 ** _Week 94a – The Heiress_**

Wilhelmina Constantine von W-, Heiress and Lady of the Hamlet: Her Diary.

 _The dreams are coming more often. Ever since I broke the seal on the Courtyard gates._

 _I see my Ancestor in his youth, and the disgusting revels he indulged in. I have been enquiring among the townsfolk, and it seems that, in their long and rustic memories, they have treasured up quite a store of salacious and grotesque tales. This far from the great royal courts, my noble peers allowed their tastes for blood and filth to run riot. Different in degree from what I have seen myself, but not in character._

 _My adventurers have recovered, from the bodies of the blood-drinkers they have killed around the Hamlet's environs, several quite formal and intentionally infuriating invitations to the Courtyard from a thing called the Baron. By what I have pieced together, he might have been one particularly vicious nobleman who haunted my Ancestor's halls years ago._

 _Changed now, of course. Not that it matters. I sent Maynet and a select group of those who have explored the Courtyard before in after him. It was a long, hard journey, but they found the monstrous thing and put an end to it._

 _They are all shaken beyond reason. Well, Maynet is always like that. But I sent them all to work off their troubles in their own ways. Hopefully the Brothel is still standing when Baudry and that bounty hunter Montgomery are done with it._

 _Bosc seems perplexed by something. She's muttering more than usual. I'll have to check in with her._

 _Lady W., Heiress._

* * *

 ** _Week 94b – Bosc, Plague Doctor_**

 _I am offended past reason. Baudry is cured._

 _Baudry and Vernon both, in fact. And they tell me that Montgomery contracted the disease disease in their last mission. All cured. Cured!_

 _I could barely hold onto them long enough to perform a few simple tests before they dispersed to the Brothel or the Abbey, as their tastes dictated. Uneducated vagabonds. They have no concern for learning._

 _They say that they felt the "curse" lifting as soon as they slew the Baron-thing. But I refuse to accept that this is a purely magical malady. It is ridiculous to suggest! The symptoms, while baffling, were more those of illness than enchantment._

 _Fortunately, I have samples and records, and there is much to do._

 _It is still a disappointment. At least it is distracting many of the old guard from Picvini's death. That struck several of them very badly._

 _Bosc, Dr. Md., physician._

* * *

 ** _Week 95 – Hue, Highwaywoman_**

 _My only real friend here is dead._

 _I caught a few snatches of what happened, from those foreigners Aljarhaa and Howard. Something about a shambling horror from the stars. Nothing I've ever heard of before._

 _That dancer had something to do with it. She looks guilty when she talks about it. I'm going to get to the bottom of this. I need to know what actually happened and why Picvini is dead._

 _He was my only friend._

 _Hue._

* * *

 ** _Week 96 – Miron, Antiquarian_**

 _To: My Noble Correspondent:_

 _Your Grace,_

 _Per your instructions, I have undertaken an investigation as to the means by which the late and unlamented lord of this place, known to locals as the Ancestor, secured certain mystical items and obscure texts._

 _I have delved into records found in the Ruins and spoken covertly with some of the Cove folk. It seems that he had several lines of communication, but one in particular involves a group of smugglers and pirates that used to haunt these shores._

 _It seems that they disappeared under mysterious circumstances some years ago, before the Ancestor himself vanished. However, I found a fisherman who was able to sketch their figurehead and describe some members of the crew, who used to purchase salt fish from him._

 _Your Grace, it was the very same ship and the very same damned, drowned crew that I have encountered twice before. This speaks to a suspicion I have long held that much of the evil infesting this corner of the land is not simply endemic to the region, but rather a direct result of the Ancestor's own arcane researches._

 _I await your next instruction._

 _Your Correspondent,_

 _Miron._


	7. Intoxication

**_Week 97 – Pettiloup, Falconer_**

 _I have seen things here that I never could have imagined. Never wanted to imagine, come to that._

 _Out of all the dreadful things I witnessed in brigand camps, nothing could compare to that towering mountain of flesh, that cleaver as big as a dinner table slashing down at us… it makes my breath catch in my throat just to remember._

 _And we killed it! Papillon tore at its face and Vatteville and I filled it with arrows as Von Kalmbach and Couer hacked it to pieces. Then we got that little bastard piggie that was following the big one around, and we made him squeal a different tune._

 _I took his leather flags as a trophy. Little fiend. I can only imagine what vicious tricks he got up to with the folk taken by the Swine._

 _Von Kalmbach tells me that they've hunted him down and thought him dead before, but this time we made damn'd sure of it._

 _It's maddening and dangerous here, but there is a wild exhilaration in it, too. Something so unreal about these beasts that it feels almost like a game to slaughter them._

 _It's not a game, though. Two men died last month. The Warrens are full of corpses._

 _I can't lose sight of that or I will start making mistakes._

 _Pettiloup._

* * *

 ** _Week 98 – Vernon, Arbalest_**

 _Blood has healed me._

 _I spent two months shaking with need, a need kept at bay only by the blood. Blood cursed and infected me, blood sustained me, and now the blood of that disgusting Baron has cured me._

 _I remember the horrifying, wonderful sensation of the blood coursing through me, the thirst and power it brought. And it is gone, thank the Light. But now…_

 _Do I leave? I don't think I can. Part of me wants to go back there, to the Courtyard._

 _There are fouler things there than the Baron, and I will be damned if I allow them to survive._

 _Vernon._

* * *

 ** _Week 99 – The Heiress_**

Wilhelmina Constantine von W-, Heiress and Lady of the Hamlet: Her Diary.

 _First a Baron, now a Viscount. The pretensions of that insect-ridden horde of deviants plaguing my Courtyard increase. These invitations, that disgusting place . . . Filthy wretches playing at nobility, but I will not let it stand._

 _I've been sending out more scouts than usual. I know from reading his often-disgusting journals that my Ancestor had prepared certain mystical weapons against the Courtyard inhabitants – sensible, given that I strongly suspect he had a hand in creating them. In particular, there is an enchanted mirror, currently hidden within the Ruins, that I intend to lay my hands on shortly._

 _Then, monsieur le Viscount, we shall see about your mocking invitation._

 _Lady W., Heiress._

* * *

 ** _Week 100 – Montgomery, Bounty Hunter_**

 _I haven't dreamed once since we killed the Baron._

 _I wonder why that is. I used to dream every night. Bright, strange lands and odd people, ships in the sky and things I can't even describe._

 _Can't describe. I couldn't describe the Baron to the Heiress. Vile creature, utterly vile. I don't know how I would have begun. I opened my mouth to tell her how my blood surged in my veins, how my stomach churned, how those horrid cocoons burst open to reveal horrors…_

 _The words stuck in my craw. They would not come out. I can still feel the insects buzzing around me, the horror of it all, the gore dripping down my arms._

 _I was mad for a time. I know I was infected with that evil disease the Courtyard brings. But I could not stop, my axe would not rest easy until I sheathed it in flesh._

 _Things are different now. I don't understand how. But I am alive and I am here and I will make the best of it._

 _I wonder why I don't dream?_

* * *

 ** _Week 101 – Couer, Occultist_**

Written in a language of the East.

 _By profession and upbringing, I do not indulge in intoxicants. I know the One Prophet's words for the lies they are, and I see the ultimate futility of all my actions, all the squirming of humanity upon this deadly globe. But the asceticisms of my trade and religion are carved too deeply upon me to change. I have never tasted wine._

 _But intoxication is now thrust upon me. Intoxication! Like a fire in my heart, a leaping joy in my heart, strength in my limbs and a soothing, however temporary, of the muffling blackness that surrounds me._

 _I could almost kiss the monstrous thing that has cursed and blessed me. There is something more crimson than blood flowing through my veins and I feel alive once more._

 _A grim joke that the drunken human beast Kalmbach has been similarly affected. I wonder if his barbarian plaything will appreciate the change, or even notice? Will mere alcohol lose its savor for him?_

 _I know the answer to that, although he has probably not realized it yet. There is only one thing that can quench this thirst. I saw his eyes when that crocodilian fiend tore Vernon to pieces. He was watching her blood. So was I._

 _Nouh ibn Abdolreza._


	8. Death in the Mud

**_Week 102 – Bosc, Plague Doctor_**

 _I have to admit, I always assumed it would be syphilis. But as fortune would have it, the first disease apart from hangovers that I am called upon to treat for Von Kalmbach is what the superstitious are now calling the Crimson Curse._

 _It has been an interesting experience. The moody Easterner Couer has been similarly afflicted. I recently accompanied them on an expedition to the Warrens, destroying swine altars to their wretched god-thing, and their behavior has definitely altered._

 _Couer is more expressive, I will say that, and not merely the rantings for blood that other victims have displayed. He is much more given, now, to expressing his low opinion of the intelligence, hygiene, character, and general bearing of those around him._

 _I admit to a certain sympathy with that point of view, but I must draw the line when he chooses to include_ me _in his excoriations._

 _Von Kalmbach, contrarily, is more withdrawn. As with many of those Northern folk, there is a savagery that underlies his devil-may-care half-nihilism, but it seems much closer to the surface now._

 _The heathen Gwenllian seems almost smug about something, so I gather it hasn't affected his performance in the tent. Noisy louts._

 _I'll have to examine her soon._

 _Bosc, Dr. Md., physician._

* * *

 ** _Week 103 – Fortier, Raven Fiend Abomination_**

 _There is some madness spreading in the Hamlet. A curse, or a plague, or something of both. I do not know, but the part of me that is different can sense it._

 _I visited the Cove with Howard, Bossard, and Vatteville. They are all kind to me. Vatteville is… motherly. Howard is remote, though. I think he is worried about Couer._

 _It's strange. I felt more at home around the campfire in that rotting sea-drenched wasteland than I ever have in the Hamlet with Bosc poking and prodding._

 _My name is Fortier. I am a woman. I am human._

* * *

 ** _Week 104 – Von Kalmbach, Crusader_**

 _I am shamed._

 _I am not a temperate man. If the Light enjoys forgiveness, I'm happy to give it all the sinning it can stand to forgive, and as long as my sword is in service to its enemies I'm assured by the priests that all is well._

 _But this is different. My thirst for drink, for women, for Gwenllian are all eclipsed by this mad craving. I refused to believe it, set out to war with none of that crimson concoction the Heiress calls Blood, and I cannot think back on my actions without feeling my stomach twist._

 _There is a limit all campaigners know not to push beyond, in the little jibes and cruelties that make the trail bearable, and I knew from the looks in my companions eyes that I was past it, but I could not control myself – pushing into every nook looking for something to satisfy that wild desire, staring at their wounds and mocking their pain._

 _It disgusts me. I must speak with that bitch Bosc. Maybe she has something to take the edge off. Or maybe there's nothing for it but the Blood._

 _Gottfried von Kalmbach._

* * *

 ** _Week 105 – Elers, Jester_**

 _I've got what Baudry had. The insect demons that infest the Courtyard found me in the Cove, bless them. Light knows how they did. But they found me and they got me like I knew they would._

 _I should probably tell someone, but it's easier to filch the Blood than it is to let Dr. Bosc poke and stab and cluck at you._

 _As long as the Heiress doesn't notice, it should be fine._

 _If she does, maybe it just means I'll go out with a flourish. I don't know what I'm doing here. Getting paid to be terrified by monsters, getting paid to ease other people's cares with my music. It's not worth it._

 _At least the Blood is a reason to stay._

 _Jacob Elers._

* * *

 ** _Week 106a – Miron, Antiquarian_**

A letter found in her belongings, stained with blood.

 _To: My Noble Correspondent:_

 _Your Grace,_

 _I have many exciting developments to report._

 _Chiefly is the spread of a new and strange malady in this benighted land, which I once hoped to leave. It is something like a curse in the blood, a burning, intoxicating sensation and a thirsty craving like none I have ever felt._

 _There is no cure but the Blood, and it tastes like wine._

 _The other developments… The Heiress has us raiding the sunken Courtyard that used to house her Ancestor's degenerate bacchanals. I write this letter from that Courtyard, with a crate of crimson bottles beside me and the buzz of monstrous wings in my ears._

 _My jaw feels strange. My eyes are twitching. Something is happening to me._

 _More later. The monsters are coming._

 _Your Correspondent,_

 _Miron._

* * *

 ** _Week 106b – The Heiress_**

Wilhelmina Constantine von W-, Heiress and Lady of the Hamlet: Her Diary.

 _Damn the luck, that pretentious wretch Miron is dead._

 _She may have been a spy and a thief, and disgustingly fond of the brothel, in addition to her lack of scruples and constant need to remind one of her education, but at least she was interesting. And now her patron the Duke will probably send in someone else, if he even cares about this place anymore._

 _I had her belongings searched, of course, and I suspect his interest in this place to be genealogical. Wouldn't_ that _be a juicy bit of court gossip? This bears looking in to. My side of the family may be half respectable, but if the Duke is related to that Ancestor of mine at any nearness, I can well imagine the lengths to which he would go to conceal the fact._

 _At any rate, I can comfort myself in the fact that Miron passed away as I would have wished: in the mud, insane, surrounded by monsters._

 _Lady W., Heiress._


	9. Spreading Crimson

**_Week 107 – Berners, Grave Robber_**

 _Dear Diary,_

 _I don't know quite what has come over me. I feel extremely peculiar._

 _There's a music I can hear, very faintly, far away, and I can't seem to shake it. Ever since the Cove, and fighting that… woman. Woman? I don't know!_

 _She was very strange, and very tall, and chilly and haunting and I don't really understand why I went running to her. There was a queer prickling feeling in my skin, and I'm afraid I may have knifed Bosc._

 _She's fine now, thank heavens, but it was very embarrassing. It would have been even more awkward if, once I'd shaken off the spell, Bosc hadn't gone a bit mad herself. She threw those disorienting powders of hers at me, and if I hadn't been quick enough I might have gone even more 'round the moon than I actually was._

 _Fortunately, she seems to be content to divert herself experimenting on our cursed compatriots and drinking, or talking, or rutting, or whatever it is she and Dismas get up to. Maybe they just insult each other._

 _I need some tea._

 _Signed, Berners._

* * *

 ** _Week 108 – The Heiress_**

Wilhelmina Constantine von W-, Heiress and Lady of the Hamlet: Her Diary.

 _Despite all of my considerable efforts, my attempts to put an end to that monstrous Viscount's mockery have been unavailing. My first expedition failed, and ever since the gates have been shut. The expeditions I've sent to probe the ways into the Courtyard have universally reported that there is no way past except that gate, and it is sealed by some disgusting magic that none of my occultists have been able to breach._

 _I know they are motivated, too. Especially Couer._

 _It makes my blood boil to know that insect-thing is lurking out there, giggling and laughing as I try again and again to seek it out and spill its filthy guts._

 _No matter. There's work to be done. More districts to renovate, more beasts to slay. We finally put an end to the singing sea-demon in the Cove, although Berners and Bosc seem a bit embarrassed about the whole business._

 _Speaking of monsters, Brèvedent has been bending my ear about the Warrens again. She's all afire to go hunting the swine's flesh-god. Perhaps I'll let her go just to have some peace._

 _Lady W., Heiress._

* * *

 ** _Week 109 – Brèvedent, Plague Doctor_**

 _I wonder what kind of a doctor Thorel was? Licinius, I should say. I feel almost intimate with him now. After watching him plunge those gorgeous arms elbow-deep into the wonderful, divine, Formless Flesh!_

 _I know that the Flesh is immortal. Nothing we can do to it would possibly harm it. The piece I took away and hid is growing, so wonderfully fast! It eats about a pig's worth of meat every week now, and it twitches and wriggles in the sack I sewed for it. I can see its eyes and mouths peeking out. It is beautiful._

 _And watching how Dr. Thorel tore into the Flesh… The shifting of his body, the way his veins bulged and smoked with eldritch blood, the_ howling!

 _Maybe he will understand. Maybe that beast inside him will give him insight. Maybe I should share the Flesh with him._

 _Brèvedent._

* * *

 ** _Week 110 – Fortier, Raven Fiend Abomination_**

 _I feel like screaming._

 _I could tear this horrid place apart if I thought it would help. I can't control my hands shaking. I've ripped the paper already just writing this, but I have to express it somewhere._

 _I am sick. Not just the other side of me. My skin is on fire, I can feel my hair bristling and when I look at myself in the mirror I get flashes of both me when I am different, and of something else._

 _I have never even seen one of the Courtyard monsters, and now I am becoming one of them. It isn't –_

 _When has this ever been fair._

 _My name is Fortier. I am losing my mind._

* * *

 ** _Week 111 – Bosc, Plague Doctor_**

 _Gwenllian has become infected with the Crimson Curse. You can only imagine my surprise. Von Kalmbach doesn't even have the good grace to look embarrassed._

 _Perhaps he's not at fault, though. The recent resurgence of the disease doesn't seem to follow any particular pattern, certainly not what I'd expect of a lovers' illness. After all, Fortier suffers from it, and as interesting as she is I rather doubt anyone would share such an embrace with her._

 _I take it the fact that Dismas is not yet ill as a very surprising mixed blessing. With how frequently he manages to blunder into some new sickness I'm astonished that he hasn't contracted this one yet._

 _I must say I would enjoy the excuse to draw blood from him again, though._

 _Bosc, Dr. Md., physician._


	10. The Sick

**_Week 112 – Baudry, Occultist_**

 _It is very strange to visit the Courtyard untroubled by my past illness._

 _There is an odd cast to the light there, a murky red that seems to come from no healthy sun, but when I was afflicted by the Curse it felt like home. A strange and terrible disease, that._

 _But there are many strange and terrible diseases here, in this rotting wound in the world. I have spoken with my countryman Howard and the physician Bosc. Strange forms of leprosy, the demonic possession of Thorel and Fortier, the Crimson Curse that once gripped me._

 _It is a wonder any of us are alive and sane._

 _Maybe staying here is in itself a form of insanity._

 _Baudry._

* * *

 ** _Week 113 – Baldwin, Leper_**

 _My dearest wife,_

 _I will never send this letter to you. But I hope you know that I miss you terribly._

 _That is a foolish, cruel, selfish thing to hope, of course. But I can't shake the thought. I want you to think I am dead. I want you to know that I am alive. I am torn in a hundred directions._

 _At least here there are things to take my mind off it. Good deeds to perform, great evils to slay. More than I ever did for anyone as a king._

 _My disease seems abated here, among heretics and the insane. I do not understand why, but there are others with conditions like mine, and they seem hale and whole as well._

 _Petals must fall. My flesh will never mend, but I pray that my heart will. And yours as well, my queen._

 _Your Baldwin._

* * *

 ** _Week 114 – Aljarhaa, Shieldbreaker_**

 _I feel free. For months I have been wandering in a bleak, haunted land, abandoned by my oracles, but now everything seems different._

 _I came to this place to kill my demons, and in my nightmares tonight they made themselves manifest once more, and the dead shell of the old Aljarhaa sloughed away as I slaughtered them._

 _The oracles don't matter. The lies don't matter. I was brought here to kill, and it makes my heart sing and my feet move to think of it._

 _There are more serpents to be slain and more monsters to put down, and I am present in this task, heart and soul._

 _Halim Aljarhaa._

* * *

 ** _Week 115 – Hue, Highwaywoman_**

 _Picvini's dead, and I don't even get the satisfaction of taking it out on anyone._

 _I went on a mission with that withered bastard Howard, and I think he must have known I suspected him. He roped me into a conversation, and we talked, and talked, and then fought more fecking fish-things, and he saved my life when the vampires came._

 _He couldn't stop them from biting me, though. I can feel whatever they put in me working. It's changing things._

 _Picvini, why did you invite me here? I'm all alone. I don't even have revenge to keep me company now._

 _Hue._

* * *

 ** _Week 116 – Couer, Occultist_**

 _I do not know how long I can bear this._

 _My veins seethe, my mind rushes in strange loops and then my body acts without my bidding. I do not regret the little hurts I have inflicted upon my so-called companions, but the lack of control fills me with fear._

 _My hands are changing. Coarse spikes protrude from my knuckles. The skin is hardening into chitin._

 _This will not end well. We have finally hunted down some of the Viscount's messengers, though, and the Courtyard gates stand open._

 _If we lift this curse, if my body is healed, will the darkness enfold me again? I do not know if I can bear it._

 _Nouh ibn Abdolreza._


	11. Silver Linings

**_Week 117 – Craon, Librarian_**

 _Dear Diary,_

 _I don't know what's come over me. I'm turning into quite as much of a lunatic as the rest of them._

 _The Heiress gave me a job cataloging the books and other loot her minions have been dragging back from the surrounding areas, and while I've been enjoying that quite a bit – particularly as it involves being close to her, and she is very interesting. A little scary, but very interesting. Anyways, it's fun and I'm good at it, and you won't believe this, but I actually asked to be sent out on an expedition again._

 _Absolutely the most daring thing I have ever done. It's crazy. I know it's crazy. This place is making me crazy. But she agreed and sent me and some of the others out to the Ruins to get some old relics, and now I'm richer than I ever have been before._

 _Not_ rich _rich, not really, but more money than I've ever seen. And I didn't even have to hit anything with my books._

 _I can see why some of them keep going out over and over again._

 _Craon._

* * *

 ** _Week 118a – The Heiress_**

Wilhelmina Constantine von W-, Heiress and Lady of the Hamlet: Her Diary.

 _Success at last! These months of nightmares have been worth it. The Viscount has been put down for ever, and his boasts and feastings are dead in the muck with him._

 _I took Von Kalmbach with me, and Ecouland – they have seen terrors before, and both were haunted by the blood craving disease that comes from the Courtyard. It seems to make them fight like demons themselves. Fortier, too, fights like the monster she is. They all proved themselves many times over in that crimson maze._

 _It seemed like weeks, but we broke through and put that cannibalistic horror to death in his own vile eating hall._

 _So that's over. The charmingly eager librarian Craon has been a great help. She's managed to piece together some very interesting information from Miron's notes and the estate's books._

 _As I suspected, it seems that every evil that besets this place stems, somehow or the other, from my Ancestor's insatiable appetite for villainy. The swine, the black circle of necromancers, the sea-witch and the Hag, all of it is his fault somehow or the other. And as my dreams suggested, the Courtyard is his responsibility as well._

 _There is one final horror there, a Countess bulging with unspeakable life. I found a letter from her among the Viscount's possessions._

 _I'm sending some adventurers to send the crew of the Cove's ghost ship to their final rest. Then she's next._

 _As the Light is my witness, I will make this place fit for human habitation or go insane trying._

 _Lady W., Heiress._

* * *

 ** _Week 118b – Bosc, Plague Doctor_**

 _I am_ incensed. _It has happened again. Every single infected patient is cured. Magically! Miraculously!_ Infuriatingly!

 _I cannot even write. This is lunacy._ **_What kind of disease is this?_**

 _Bosc, Dr. Md., physician._

* * *

 ** _Week 119 – Fortier, Raven Fiend Abomination_**

 _I feel as though I have been seeing everything through a red haze for weeks. I look down at my hands and remember pouncing on Von Kalmbach muttering about the Blood, and about his red-rimmed eyes staring back at me and understanding perfectly._

 _We were all sick and mad. Now? He is well, and Ecouland is well, and everyone is well except for me._

 _The Curse is lifted for the moment, but_ my _curse remains._

 _At least I have control of my limbs again. For the moment._

 _I almost wish the Shrieker would come back._

 _My name is Fortier. I am human._

* * *

 ** _Week 120 – Von Kalmbach, Crusader_**

 _After the hell that they call the Courtyard, the mere cultists and fish-beasts of the Cove seem almost prosaic. Barely more alien than the pagan hordes I used to fight in the East._

 _I've spoken long with Gwenllian. We didn't really talk when we were under the damnable red spell of those vampires. Just drank and rutted and tried not to think about the Blood._

 _We're still drinking and rutting, but now we can talk like humans again, even if she is still a savage._

 _I want to marry her. That's the most insane thing of all._

 _When this is over, I'm going to take her North with me._

 _Gottfried von Kalmbach._


	12. Memories Resurgent

**_Week 121 – Dismas, Highwayman_**

 _Fecking stupid seekers. You'd think they_ wanted _to die._

 _Pack of four climbed right out of their stagecoach and rambled off into the Cove after treasure before even talking with the Heiress. As far as I've been able to find, they're all dead. The Heiress is furious. More about them not coming to her for orders than about them dying, I shouldn't wonder._

 _I've been preoccupied lately. We all have, especially Bosc, who is clawing at the walls in frustration no matter how much she tries to hide it. She told me once that she started burning her textbooks after she went down beneath the manor into that insane place where Pevrel and Raoullin vanished, and I'm thankful that she isn't at that point again._

 _Might be close, though._

 _So many have died. Over a dozen, I think. Certainly after this lot. Picvini and Rache. Reynauld._

 _Is it almost over?_

 _Dismas_

* * *

 ** _Week 122 – Thorel, Abomination_**

 _Been remiss in my writing for the past year. Since going underneath the Manor. My hands hurt and shake, but that became an excuse and then a habit._

 _But I could not keep this locked inside my head._

 _Rache was dead. I saw her die. I saw the thing that bore her to the ground and crushed her, and I felt the broken places in her body. I carried her back to the Abbey in my own hands and buried her._

 _We had gone down into that darkest dungeon together. Fought through nightmares. Supported each other. Talked after, as much as she was willing. And I failed her. Couldn't help her. None of my scientific knowledge, my theological learning, none of it helped._

 _She was sitting on my writing desk when I woke up this morning._

 _She died a year ago and she just looked at me and I could see a faltering smile underneath the greasepaint she wears, and she waved at me. Said she didn't know who else to go to._

 _Sounded lost and scared. Don't think she knew how long it'd been._

 _I dug up her grave. The box was broken and empty. Not recently._

 _Is this some veiled blessing?_

 _She's sleeping in my bed and I am pushing myself to write through the pain. I wish Raoullin was alive. I wish Picvini hadn't -_

 _I didn't tell her that Picvini is dead. Oh, Light._

 _I must consult with Howard and perhaps the Heiress. This is passing strange._

 _Licinius Thorel, Dr. Theol., Dr. Md._

* * *

 ** _Week 123 – Mathan, Houndmaster_**

 _I've been spending so much of my time keeping the peace that I'd almost forgotten why I came to the Hamlet. Old habits die hard, and I was a constable for a long, long time._

 _It's easier here, I'd say. For one, none of the mercenaries wants to cross the Heiress, and I can't blame them. She's a hellcat._

 _I had to get away, though. There have been too many folks disappearing lately. Reminded me of why I left the city, so I went to the Warrens to poke around. Brought back some food they'd stolen, but with their king dead and their god-thing gone they've quieted down a fair bit._

 _Didn't find anything there. Nothing fresh, that is. I think they're just eating each other now. Which means it's probably someone in the Hamlet._

 _Damn it all. Hope it's not the Heiress._

 _Mathan._

* * *

 ** _Week 124 – Pettiloup, Falconer_**

 _Death is everywhere. A whole team got slaughtered in the Cove last month, and girls are disappearing from the Hamlet every week, seems like. Maybe running off, maybe not. So we're scouring the Warrens._

 _I must've killed dozens of those piggie bastards. Maybe a hundred all told. We've been routing out their tunnels for weeks and we haven't found any fresh bodies. No fresh_ human _bodies, that is._

 _Probably just some piece of garbage selling them to brigands. Disgusting, but at least I'm too scarred up to interest them._

 _Brings back bad memories, is all._

 _Pettiloup._

* * *

 ** _Week 125 prologue – The Heiress_**

Wilhelmina Constantine von W-, Heiress and Lady of the Hamlet: Her Diary.

 _It's almost over._

 _I must admit to a certain giddy tension. I don't know what to compare it to. My first formal dance, or my first duel. A bit of both, perhaps._

 _I've laid my plans and selected my bodyguards. Pettiloup and Couer, and Maynet of course. Fanatic and half a heretic that he is, no one is better than he at slaying those vampiric creatures._

 _There's also a girl named Rache, another jester, with a painted face and a very queer attitude. I'd never met her before, but Maynet took one look at her and immediately insisted that she was fated to come. I talked with her and tested her skills, and she certainly seems qualified enough. And Elers, my own minstrel, was not precisely enthusiastic about reentering the Courtyard._

 _It's strange, though. Dr. Thorel almost begged to be allowed to accompany us, but Fortier took another bad turn recently when the Shrieker was sighted again, and I need him to help her._

 _We're going to map out the route to the self-styled Countess, then regroup and return with another party. Then maybe I'll be free of these damned distracting dreams about her._

 _Lady W., Heiress._


	13. The Countess' Courtyard - First Assault

**_Week 125 – The Countess' Courtyard_**

 **First Entry: History Repeating, Red**

 **Rache, Harlequin Jester**

 _Thorel says that I've been gone for a year, and I don't know if I believe him or not._

 _I don't remember much. Acting a bit mad with Picvini. The crazy shivery feelings, the gongs and the noise, the ecstasy of that wicked rhythm._

 _Picvini is dead. Pevrel is dead. Raoullin is dead. Miron is dead. The Heir is dead, which seems simultaneously impossible and inevitable now that I think about it._

 _Was I really dead? Thorel tells me I was all broken inside. He put me in the ground himself, but the grave's empty now._

 _I wish I could remember._

 _I wonder why Maynet insisted I came with them into the Courtyard? It reminds me of that place beneath the manor, in its way. The hair on my forearms prickles and stands upright when I think of it. And I think of Picvini and I believe my heart will burst._

 _Where have I been this last year? Have I been anywhere? Or has my soul been wandering in spaces between times?_

 _Maybe everything just keeps happening again and again._

 **Second Entry: The Gate of Guilt**

 **Pettiloup, Falconer**

 _This damned red light reminds me of the burning villages when I was raiding with the Vvulf. Maybe this hell I've been cast into is punishment for that, for all the men and women I saw murdered and ravaged._

 _You'd think swearing to kill that bastard would get me some credit, but somebody else got to him first. How am I supposed to get absolution now? Am I to mortify my flesh like Maynet?_

 _A joke, a joke, and it drops like lead from my fingertips onto the paper. The red light makes me remember things I want to forget. I can still hear that one poor girl._

 _And I'm doing nothing to help the ones disappearing from the Hamlet. I'm doing nothing for anyone. I'm just taking my bow and using it to forget for a little while. Damn it all._

 _I hate this. I hate it all. Maybe I'll get lucky and one of those fecking vampire things will eat me and I won't have to think about this anymore._

 _I want to leave, but where would I go?_

 _Pettiloup._

 **Third Entry: The Gate of Anger**

 **Couer, Occultist**

 _I knew this would happen._

 _This damned Courtyard with that heathen fool Maynet and those two stupid girls. I should never have agreed to come._

 _Trudging through this miserable swamp, beset by insects and monsters and the inane babble of my companions. I almost welcomed the sting that returned my madness and stripped away the need to restrain my tongue._

 _It's been barely two months since this curse was lifted and I am glad it has returned, if only to spite the others._

 _Nouh ibn Abdolreza._

 **Fourth Entry: Back from Hell**

 **Iris, Pariah Flagellant, rescued from the Courtyard**

 _Light! Light! The Light is in my heart and eyes and I knew it would come for me!_

 _Hanging from those chains, with blood dripping down my face, I saw a vision. My sight was drowned in red and my eyes were anointed with holy suffering, and_ I saw the Light.

 _Every lash was a tender caress and a reminder that salvation was coming. Salvation and a terrible, wonderful burden!_

 _I almost doubted when I saw him for the first time. I didn't think he could possibly be coming to save me. But I saw the wounds in his body and the holy peace in his eyes, and then he struck my chains away and his blood splashed on my face and mixed with my own, and the visions came again and I saw that the raw wounds on my chest and belly formed the same holy brand that shone on his skin._

 _We prayed together and mortified our flesh and howled to heaven in the euphoria of blood and holy grace._

 _My sins fall away from me in streaming crimson and scraps of flesh, and the Light is in my soul. Evil cannot stand against it._

 **Fifth Entry: Misgivings**

 **Thorel, Abomination**

 _Rache went to the Courtyard._

 _That flagellant, Maynet, talked the Heiress into it. She'd never even met Rache before. She listens to him too much. He is not a stable man._

 _I know these fanatics. Raoullin was not like them. He'd passed through heresy and a deep, dangerous fanaticism but he emerged with a well of patience and kindness in his heart. Maynet is simply insane, and that girl they brought back from the Courtyard is as mad as he is._

 _Rache seems well, at least. Something to be thankful for._

 _Now to hunt down vampires until we can wring an invitation back into the courtyard from one of them. Maybe then we can get some peace._

 _Licinius Thorel, Dr. Theol., Dr. Md._


	14. A Small Death, Hardly Noticed

**_Week 126 – Craon, Librarian_**

 _Dear Diary,_

 _The attacks on the Courtyard have resulted in quite a few poor prisoners being freed. Some of them have taken service with the Heiress – a peculiar man named Falaise, a robber called Courci, and a terrifying woman named Iris who carries a whip everywhere and wears a mask. She looks like that crazy man Maynet. I never saw anything like them at the university, that's certain!_

 _They're not like that kind wizard Pancevolt. It's much nicer sitting at camp reading poetry and talking about philosophy than watching Falaise mope about in his chains and Courci glare at the dark, and listen to Iris beating herself and moaning._

 _I want to ask the Heiress her first name, but that would be altogether too daring. I'm blushing just thinking about it._

 _I wonder if she'd tell me?_

 _Craon_

* * *

 ** _Week 127a – Craon, Librarian_**

 _Dear Diary,_

 _Look at me, out on a mission again so soon! I'm sure I'm catching her eye a bit at least. I worked up the courage to ask her to send me out, to the Warrens for the first time to catalog some of the tunnels._

 _I can't wait to get back._

 _Craon._

* * *

 ** _Week 127b – The Heiress_**

Wilhelmina Constantine von W-, Heiress and Lady of the Hamlet: Her Diary.

 _I feel unsettled._

 _The last expedition I sent to the Warrens, my very helpful assistant Craon asked to join. She's been out before. Then the silly girl got herself skewered by a swine javelin and now I find in her diary that she was trying to impress me._

 _Damned foolish, but it gets under my skin. Maybe it's just the atmosphere of this place getting to me. I'm not used to things nettling me like this._

 _It's a damnable waste. I hope the swine didn't get to eat too much of her before the others put them down._

 _Lady W., Heiress._

* * *

 ** _Week 128 – Elers, Jester_**

 _Awfully peculiar world we live in. For all of his knowledge and magic, that Eastern rascal Couer has been victimized by the Crimson Curse again, while poor ignorant Elers who he sneers at is healthy and happy._

 _Healthy, anyways. I've never met a happy minstrel, but perhaps that's more the environment than the profession. Music and jests around the noble is a touchy business._

 _Her Ladyship hasn't been in the mood for either lately. So I'm out to the Warrens to hunt for vampires, which to be frank is more to my taste regardless._

 _Jacob Elers_

* * *

 ** _Week 129 – Pettiloup, Falconer_**

 _My punishment, apparently, is upon me. I've seen the others in the grip of this malady, and now it's my turn._

 _I wonder what they were suffering for? I could play guessing games all day. Couer for his general unpleasantness and traffic with darkness, that madwoman Iris for heresy, Montfiquet for bringing in innocent bounties, and poor Pettiloup for thieving and helping killers and looking the other way when things were done that oughtn't have been._

 _Still, the Blood soothes the conscience as aptly as it soothes the cravings._

 _Pettiloup_

* * *

 ** _Week 130 – Gwenllian, Hellion_**

 _I have been learning to write from Von Kalmbach._

 _He is better at poetry and rutting than he is at teaching._

 _He is better at fighting, too._

 _We were both very crazy for a long time with that red sickness._

 _He said he wants to marry me._

 _That was a crazy thing to say._

 _I am an outcast and so is he. So maybe it would be alright._


	15. New Blood

**_Week 131 – Sauvigni, Highwayman_**

 _Strange job, hunting vampires. Not the worst I've had by a long stretch, but strange._

 _Funny looking things, too, all bug-looking, but they go for your neck like vampires and they drink your blood. Damned unpleasant, but they die like anything else._

 _We can't seem to find the ones her Ladyship the Heiress wants, but we'll get them eventually. Scores of us scouring the hills and tunnels every week, we're bound to turn up something eventually._

 _And in the meantime, there's the Tavern waiting for all this hard-earned gold._

 _Sauvigni_

* * *

 ** _Week 132 – Fitzrolf, Musketeer_**

 _The Diary of Emmanuelle Fitzrolf_

 _I am home._

 _I have hunted the most savage beasts across distant lands, traveled with the crusade to chase lions and the great serpents of the desert, fought the fierce brigands of the East and the dread roc of the West, and here I experienced a hunt that thrilled me to my core in a way nothing ever has._

 _I can't even describe it, my heart is still throbbing. There was a mad purple void, a step and then a falling sensation and there we were, facing down a huge, monstrous prey like nothing in this world or any other! It was beautiful, and those terrible lashing arms slicing into us, and the feeling of walking on the knife's edge… Glorious! Joyous! Life and wine and the Fountain of Youth!_

 _I think I'm addicted to this place._

 _Fitzrolf_

* * *

 ** _Week 133 – Bardiche, Hellion_**

 _This is the strangest place I've ever fought in, and I've been carrying my spear to war for two decades._

 _The Lady pays better than any I've ever served under, which I suppose makes sense. It's a sight harder to find folks willing to fight demons and blood-suckers than simple men._

 _I've seen the eyes of the ones that have that red disease. They've all got this sunken look. Like they're staring very, very hard at something just under your skin._

 _I don't care. Fighting and writing are the only things I know how to do, and I might as well risk my neck for my bread and board here as elsewhere._

 _Bardiche_

* * *

 ** _Week 134 – Bardiche, Hellion_**

 _There's a brutal, berserk giddiness in the Blood, once it's touched you. It's a little like being drunk or rutting, and a little like nothing else I've ever felt._

 _I can only write this because I've come down from the worst, or best, of it. It hits you like a hammer and your entire body shakes and then calms. There's a stillness and sense of absolute focus, but there are strings vibrating inside you and sometimes they jerk you in a direction you didn't expect._

 _I've caught myself staring at the veins underneath their skin. I have to watch that._

 _Bardiche_

* * *

 ** _Week 135 – Bosc, Plague Doctor_**

 _I've come to a conclusion. The only way I am going to be able to properly study this wretched plague is if I capture one of those bloodsucking fiends alive._

 _The question is how to do it. I'm going to need to prepare carefully for this. I'd ask Couer for help, but he's in a dangerous mood lately and I can't trust him. That new girl, the huntress, isn't blooded enough._

 _Brèvedent, now. She might be of service. I think she has just the right bit of recklessness to be willing to help with such a project._

 _Bosc, Dr. Md., physician._


	16. Last Dance

**_Week 136 – Thorel, Abomination_**

 _Had some time now to order my thoughts. About Rache, and all this. Can't uncover what happened. She doesn't know, herself, and maybe it doesn't matter._

 _My conclusion after all these weeks: Maybe it doesn't matter._

 _I'm just glad she's alive._

 _All of this is stirring things in me that I would have preferred to let lie still._

 _We found what we were looking for, though. We have the key to the Countess. It's a terrible thing we're preparing for. But I believe in the Heiress._

 _I hope no more die. I hope I can restrain it. I hope we can stop the disappearances._

 _Licinius Thorel_

* * *

 ** _Week 137 – Of Curse and Countess_**

 **First Entry: Iris, Flagellant**

 _I have been blessed beyond measure. My poor, sinful soul does not deserve the transporting ecstasy I have been given._

 _I have been chosen to carry my lash and my scarred, tattered flesh into holy battle against the unspeakable beast that kept me imprisoned for so long, feeding on me and fattening herself on my sacred blood._

 _I will not falter. I can barely contain my worshipful joy. The sinful creature will wither and die in the light of the promise of the power of suffering!_

 **Second Entry: Brèvedent, Plague Doctor**

 _Everything is going exactly as I knew it would. It's fate. It's trembling in my belly, I can feel my intestines crawling with excitement. I can barely wait._

 _There is no way the fools that infest this Hamlet will find me before it's too late, despite Mathan's sniffing around with his horrible dog. Even the finest hound's nose is no match for the fruits of chemistry, and none of this rabble can put two and two together. They're too busy sprawling in front of the Light and mewing about forgiveness, but soon they are going to see a new God._

 _It is so beautiful. Sometimes I just sit and stare at it, marveling at the endless variety of life it presents, watching as it consumes the presents I bring it. It knows me. It even touched me, once, and my skin still thrills at the memory._

 _I had to dodge a mouth right after, of course, but that's to be expected. Soon it will know its mother better._

 _Its mother. Brèvedent, the Mother of God. The thought makes me quake with dreadful pleasure!_

 _Bosc wants to capture one of the vampires and keep it caged to study the Crimson Curse. I tried not to seem too eager to agree. The Flesh is growing, and it needs to feed; why not let it fatten upon the choicest morsels available?_

 _Knowing Bosc was to be accompanying the expedition against the Countess, I naturally took the opportunity to dose her with a simple emetic decoction while we took tea together to discuss her plan, and I was pleased to take her place while she shivers in the healing beds of the Sanitarium._

 _What a glorious opportunity! I am off to the Courtyard._

 _Brèvedent_

 **Third Entry: The Heiress**

Wilhelmina Constantine von W-, Heiress and Lady of the Hamlet: Her Diary.

 _My stomach churns thinking about this final expedition into the Courtyard._

 _Final? I think so. I will do my damnedest to_ make _it so._

 _I'm still dreaming. I saw my Ancestor cut the throat of the Countess, and the bloody orgy that ensued when he infected his coterie of revelers. I do not know if it is the exhalation of that vile swampland or the psychic miasma of this Hamlet, or some taint in my blood, or the influence of some evil comet or whatever else it may be, but I know that I am well and truly sick of these damnable dreams._

 _If they stop when we have put her down, they stop. If not, I will survive. But it will be a cold day in Hell before I give up on this or anything else I set my hand to._

 _The swine are, for the most part, pacified, or at least bloodily chastened. The Ruins are free of the black circle of necromancers and we are containing the restless dead. The Weald's paths are clear and the witches mostly quiescent. The fish-things in the Cove appear to be dwindling without their queen._

 _We shall see how the blood-drinkers fare without their Countess._

 _Lady W., Heiress._

 **Fourth Entry: Couer, Occultist**

 _The Curse is lifted again. I can't bring myself to care._

 _When I was under its influence, at least there was some sort of driving energy. Not exactly purpose, but motion. Now there is nothing._

 _I sit and look at my hands. I lack the strength even to move. I remember the strange joy of the battle, calling on every one of my esoteric tricks and spells to hold back the Countess in her many forms, but it comes to me flat and motionless, like a poor painting in grey and black._

 _I dropped onto my knees in the mud as the thing flopped and died, bleeding from a thousand wounds. I saw that heathen bitch Brèvedent giggling to herself, packing away scraps of its flesh and bottling its blood when she thought no one was watching, and I could not care._

 _The affair is over. I have been deserted by my faith and by my knowledge and my will and even by my hatred. I do not have the energy to walk into the sea. I have nothing. I am done._

 _Nouh ibn Abdolreza._

* * *

 **Final Interlude: Discovery**

* * *

Mathan crouched, staring down at the mud and the flat little bits of ivory white glinting up at him in the moonlight.

"At least it wasn't the Heiress," he muttered, stroking his dog's head. "You've done well, girl."

He stood and stretched, yawning, and scratched his thigh. Long nights of patrol were taking their toll on him, and he was not young.

"She buried 'em damn shallow. Must not be used to hiding bodies, or else in a hurry," he mused. "Or just arrogant. I'll have to talk with some of the folk who know her better. Maybe Doctor Bosc can shed some light."

He glanced over at the rickety barn that Brèvedent had long ago appropriated as her workhouse and alchemical laboratory. She was a peculiar woman, even moreso than Bosc, and the memory of her strange, breathless laughter suddenly made Mathan shudder.

The barn creaked in the wind, and Mathan heard a faint sound as some of the wood bulged outwards, a nail working loose and falling to ping against cobblestones.

"Let's go, Lulubelle," he grunted. "We have work to do, before the Heiress gets back."


	17. Judgment (The End)

Lady Wilhelmina strode into her room. Once luxuriously appointed by her Ancestor for his forays into the Hamlet, then occupied by her cousin, she had stripped away the velvet and lace, the rich hangings and sensual paintings. In their place were the stark landscapes and bare wood she preferred.

The teapot was hot, and she poured slowly, mixing honey and brandy to soothe her tired limbs.

It had been a terrible fight, but it was over. The last and greatest evil she had faced down to secure this wretched land that she had inherited, put to rest in a pool of gore and misery.

Her soldiers had filed into the Hamlet slowly, spattered with mud and blood, each consumed by their own thoughts.

Couer, hawk-faced, foreign, strange and cruel, walked like a reanimated corpse to his quarters, eyes turned inwards on nothing. Iris's madness blazed out of her grinning face as she approached her penitent cell in the Abbey. Vatteville, quiet and subdued, idly stroking the polished wood of her crossbow as she composed a letter to her daughter in her mind. Brèvedent trembling, choking back laughter, as she turned aside to the barn in which she worked and lived.

The Heiress sighed, looking dully down at her filthy boots, considering the fluids splashed across the guard of her sword – the effluvia of an ancient evil mixed with her own blood and vomit.

"Job well done, for all that," she said, leaning back in her overstuffed chair, the only real bit of luxury she'd left in the room.

There was a knock at the door.

"Milady?"

The Heiress raised her eyebrows. She recognized Mathan's gravelly voice, the undercurrent of mingled reverence and suspicion that he seemed to share with the Hamlet's natives.

"Enter."

He stepped in, lamplight glowing on the darkness of his skin, and she saw the way his eyes flicked quickly around the room, looking for anything out of place.

"I've found something that you should see."

* * *

"Gods damn it all," Lady Wilhelmina spat, pushing a femur around with the toe of her boot. "Any idea how many are here?"

"I imagine it's most of the recent disappearances, milady," Mathan said quietly. His fingers were tight on his truncheon. "I haven't counted the skulls yet."

"Get Dismas and the doctor. I assume they're together, wherever they are. And whoever else is readily available," the Heiress said. "There's something unwholesome going on, and that woman is dangerous."

She looked up at Brèvedent's barn, at the boards bulging and creaking despite the lack of wind.

"Hurry."

* * *

 _Success! Success! The smoking crimson blood of that great, tempting evil will catalyze my union, and then – Endless knowledge, endless change, and the glory of immortality._

 _I have held myself back for hours because even the anticipation is like a drug. My hands shake, my heart throbs, my skin tingles. I hold the bottle to my cheek and feel it warm me, I breathe in the fumes and collapse in ecstatic dreams._

 _There are realms of the mind where the laws of nature bend and mingle with the laws of the outer spheres. I will know them._

 _I will become one with the Flesh, and I will live forever._

* * *

The scratching of Brèvedent's quill ceased at the hard knock on her door.

"Brèvedent! Open up! Heiress wants to talk with you."

Brèvedent's eyes glittered, and the quill dropped from her fingers as she slowly lowered her mask over the twitching grin she couldn't quite suppress.

The door opened, and the Heiress walked inside, hands clasped behind her back. Brèvedent could see the dark silhouettes of more people behind her. Her gaze flicked quickly over the battered greatcoat, still filthy from the Courtyard muck, the sword and pistol at the Heiress's hip.

"Brèvedent."

The plague doctor flexed her fingers, leather creaking, as she stood up from the little table she was writing at.

The Heiress took two long strides forward, lifted her right hand, and slammed the skull she was holding into the side of Brèvedent's mask. Teeth, bits of dark glass from Brèvedent's goggles, and scraps of bone flew across the room.

"You betrayed me," the Heiress said in an icy voice. Behind her, Mathan stepped into the room, his dog growling and straining at her leash.

Through the broken glass of her mask, Brèvedent's left eye rolled crazily around the room, fixing on one face, then another as Dismas and Bosc moved in.

A tremor passed up her body, and as it hit her head she screamed like a demon crow and stood ramrod straight. Her right hand moved like a machine, lifting a smoking orange potion and pouring the entire contents over her mask.

"Brèvedent, you stupid –!" Bosc hissed. "I'd prefer not to knife a colleague, but I'm not above it, believe me!"

A hollow, hitching laugh echoed out of Brèvedent's ruined and steaming mask. "None of you can **_see!_** This is a night of apotheosis!"

"Get her, girl!" Mathan growled, and Lulubelle sprang forward like a bolt of lightning, crashing into Brèvedent and throwing her hard against the wall as Mathan leaped after her, cudgel ready. The hound went for Brèvedent's throat but caught her mask instead, tearing it away, and the maddened plague doctor's bulging eyes and skeletal grin gave even the Heiress pause for just an instant.

Then Brèvedent lifted her hand and plunged her knife into Lulubelle's side, and Mathan gave a choking cry of rage and swung his club, the impact sending Brèvedent's lank hair flying around her head.

As Brèvedent raised herself up from the floor, Dismas pointed his pistol, but she slipped sideways like a horrid, robed crab and the pistol ball thumped into the floor. Upstairs, a terrible creaking came, a sound of something moving, and Brèvedent raised her eyes, ecstasy blazing from her face.

"Come to me! Be mine! Be my god and my Flesh!" she shrieked.

The metallic click as the Heiress cocked her pistol was loud in a brief stillness. Brèvedent's mouth went dry and her eyes slid past the black muzzle of the gun to the red potion she had not yet consumed. She opened her mouth, and the Heiress pulled the trigger.

The flash and crackle of gunpowder seemed to take a peculiarly long time. Then the explosion mingling with a flat, wet crunch as the ball tore through Brèvedent's skull and brain.

The Heiress let out a breath, automatically beginning to reload as the plague doctor slumped to the floor, her empty eyes still staring up towards whatever was in the attic.

"Get out of here," she said, her voice businesslike. "Mathan, see to your hound. Doctor, Dismas, burn this building immediately."

It was the work of minutes to set Brèvedent's chemical-soaked laboratory ablaze. The Heiress stood watching as Bosc tended to Lulubelle and Dismas spoke in low tones with Mathan.

Fire raced upwards toward the moon, crackling and roaring, and the Heiress' grip on her pistol tightened as another, stranger roar joined the inferno's voice.

There was a splintering sound as the roof fell inwards. The second roar ceased.

"Let's get away from here," the Heiress said. "Carry the dog. I don't want to breathe that smoke."

They moved away, quiet, shaken, into the night.

* * *

Eventually, the fire died down to embers. The ruins shifted, little collapses making it seem that something was moving.

A great beam that had covered much of Brèvedent's corpse groaned as it was pushed aside. Beneath it, a crushed, mangled, half-burned body lay, dry blood streaming away from a skull smashed by lead.

A strange, burnt, fire-melted mouth lifted and screamed in endless agony to the sky. The ruined, shapeless thing that had been in the attic hunched low over the only meat available, and began to feed.


	18. Postscript

Dear readers,

I hope you've all been enjoying reading this as much as I've enjoyed writing it. It's been a lengthy process, proceeding in fits and starts, but it's been a lot of fun for all that and I really appreciate all of the feedback and praise you've given me.

As of the last chapter, this project is complete. I have no immediate plans to continue with _Color of Madness_ diaries, but that might change.

Thanks for reading!

Rakked


	19. Color of Madness

_Update: I have decided to continue this series through the_ Color of Madness _DLC, which I am really enjoying. I'm going to continue it in this story. I really should have done that with the Crimson Court entries and the previous story, but hindsight is 20/20._

 _I hope you enjoy these little stories. Thank you to everyone who's left a review, I really appreciate it and y'all help keep me going!_

* * *

 ** _Week 138 – The Heiress_**

Wilhelmina Constantine von W-, Heiress and Lady of the Hamlet: Her Diary.

 _It can't be the absinthe, because I haven't had any for at least a week, but I'm still dreaming._

 _Maybe it's just the aftereffects of putting down the Countess and Brèvedent. Gods and little fishes, but that was abhorrent! Even so, I doubt that's the cause. I've never known myself to be so affected that it disturbs my sleep._

 _Maybe it's the lights in the sky lately._

 _I dream about soldiers, and stones, and things moving in the Courtyard's muck. Things bigger than a man. Old, stony things._

 _This place is inked through and through with curses and witchcraft and a malice that seems to challenge me._

 _Well, I'm up to that challenge, dreams or no dreams, damn it. These horrors are going to yield or die, because I am not leaving._

 _Couer's been gone for days on some damned meditation journey. When he gets back I'm going to beat him and Howard into speaking to one another for long enough to get a straight answer out of them about all that._

 _Lady W., Heiress._

* * *

 ** _Week 139a – Mathan, Houndmaster_**

 _Heiress sent us out to the Courtyard. Never been there myself, but Lulubelle sniffed us a way through the muck like she was born to it. She's a good dog. I'm glad that devil Brèvedent didn't get her too bad._

 _Even after what we've been through it's still hard to believe that someone I fought alongside could do a miserable thing like that. Stabbing a dog, killing those people. Miserable._

 _Glad she's dead._

 _We found some kind of big statue bastard in the Courtyard. I thought it was going to crush us all but that foreigner Aljarhaa smashed it to flinders. I got a funny feeling it's not really gone. There's old hate in the soil there._

 _We'll see. Got to get back to the Hamlet now. Lights in the sky making Lulubelle uneasy. There was a crash like thunder a few hours ago._

 _Feels like something's coming._

 _Mathan._

* * *

 ** _Week 139b – Rache, Harlequin Jester_**

 _Things are coming back to me._

 _It's all in flashes. Little bits of light. I remember the crazy times. I remember being broken to pieces by that thing in the Weald._

 _I feel like I've been walking through a hall of mirrors. Where is Rache? Which face is hers?_

 _I saw a light. It was… it wasn't blue. It wasn't green or any other color I can name._

 _It was in the sky and now, or yesterday, or tomorrow it fell into the world and everything has always been different._

 _I think it's why I'm here. Back. Why I've always been back I'm losing my mind._

 _I think Thorel fell in love with me. Some time between the time I died and now._

 _I wish I never woke up._

* * *

 ** _Week 140 – Bosc, Plague Doctor_**

 _A monumental achievement! Despite being poisoned by that demented woman, the experiments I had prepared for the death of the Countess have born fruit._

 _I can cure the Crimson Curse. That being the case, I am happy to accept that name as a quaint description of the disease instead of magical-minded mockery at my previous failures._

 _Dismas, layman that he is, suggested that without the Countess anchoring the mystical aspect of the Curse, it is now more susceptible to my efforts than would previously have been possible. Nonsense, of course; I always knew it would yield to my experimentations soon enough._

 _Couer has returned from his wanderings. He went to meditate and then vanished for weeks, taking every book of astronomy I possessed with him. I suspect he raided the Heiress's library as well, but I doubt she noticed. She's been far too busy to read, and with Craon dead there's no one to organize the books._

 _A comet has been flashing in the sky for days. I admit to a certain lack of expertise in matters of the heavens, but I do not feel that is quite normal._

 _It fell to the earth miles from the Hamlet, on an ancient Farmstead. I've been too busy to examine it myself, but the Heiress sent out a party to investigate._

 _Perhaps there will be some star-spawned strain of blight that I can make use of._

 _Bosc, Dr. Md., physician._


	20. On the Fringes

**_Week 141 – Audrey, Grave Robber_**

 _Dear Diary,_

 _My greed's got the best of me again._

 _I keep telling myself that if I hadn't been so damnably clay-brained and honestly drunk I never would have done it, but I think time's given the lie to that little fable. I keep doing the same things over and over again._

 _Is it that I miss the perquisites of my noble birth? I look at Lady W. and I seethe with jealousy. Even here with this rabble surrounding her, there's something that sets her apart. Something I've lost utterly. It bled out of me as I broke into that first family tomb, and as I stood numb in the dock, and as I wilted in the gaol. Now it seems right that I would take a job hunting treasures and monsters in some Light-forsaken woodland._

 _I'm still trying to understand what I saw there. You see strange happenings in my current profession, but there was something stomach-churningly_ wrong _about that thing. It was enormous, rotted flesh, bone and half-liquid crystal, and the sounds it made! The way it moved, the unearthly growth around it. It can't be from any healthy world._

 _It must be from that nightmarish comet that destroyed the Mill. That place seems to exude madness like alcohol on a drunkard's breath._

 _Maybe there's treasure there, too, though. Who knows?_

 _Audrey_

* * *

 ** _Week 142 – Bardiche, Hellion_**

 _It's been about a month since I last saw one of the blood-suckers. I know from the Lady's announcements that they managed to kill the queen of the things, or the Countess, or whatever it called itself, but things are still strange here._

 _I'm just glad to be rid of the Curse. It was hard to write when my mind kept wandering to the Blood._

 _But that's over and done with, and now it's back to a warrior's work. The Ruins are still swarming with the restless dead, and there are relics to be rescued and evil altars to purify._

 _There's something else in the wind. Something in the blasted heath out to the west, where the old Farmstead was. Everything's changed and strange out there. The few folks who went there after the comet hit say it's full of odd growth and life out of a strangely-colored dream._

 _I'd like to write about it. I have a feeling the Lady's going to be sending us out there soon to see what's happened to the old Miller and his family._

 _Bardiche_

* * *

 ** _Week 143 – Dacre, Vestal_**

 _Dacre's Daybook_

 _The work proceeds slowly._

 _I understand now why I was asked to go here. It has taken me more than a few careful inquiries, but I found it. The blasphemous scroll, the ancient depiction of a devil of the woods entwined with a fortunate human._

 _There is power here, a wellspring of elder might that the church is too weak to acknowledge or use. And there is more._

 _There is a thing in this Hamlet, a thing from the stars that sleeps in the blasted heath, and my brothers and sisters in the service of our true god do not know of it._

 _I must learn more. I shall learn more. I will see it with my own eyes and carry word back to our obscure councils, and I will be praised and elevated above the other acolytes._

 _Dacre, srv. Tenebris._

* * *

 ** _Week 144 – Bosc, Plague Doctor_**

 _There's a lull in the action. The Heiress is taking things slowly with the Farmstead, which is perfectly acceptable to me; it means that I should have time to finish another set of experiments before she'll let us properly explore the place._

 _With the Countess dead, the vampires appear to be content to lurk and twitter behind their crumbling walls. It's a bit of a pity. Now when I want to experiment on them, I must delve into the Courtyard myself._

 _Fortunately, the Heiress understands the value of my work, and has been appropriately supportive in time and manpower._

 _I took Rache with me. I still do not understand what happened. She speaks of mirrors and long intervals of timeless, mindless existence, but she is more open with Thorel than with me._

 _The only fly in the ointment is that damned moving statue that lies beneath the Courtyard muck. No matter how many times we smash it down, it seems to come back. It is most inconvenient._

 _Bosc, Dr. Md., physician._

* * *

 ** _Week 145 – Rocque, Butcher Bird_**

 _Dear Diary,_

 _I met some new people today. They're young folks, quite nice, and so far none of them have tried to kill or steal from me._

 _The big fellow's name is Loucelles. He calls himself Loucelles the Leper, and I think he's a bit more bitter about it than he tries to let on. I believe that's why he's here, though. There are strange ailments here, and strange remedies, too._

 _The girls are Griffin and Mallebisse, a wandering minstrel and a warrior-nun. Odd pair, but they seem to get on well. I think Mallebisse was concerned for me, but I've put down too many highway ruffians to be daunted by a few fishmen!_

 _I may have come back to this Hamlet to die, but I'm damned if I'm going to make it easy on them._

 _Rocque_


	21. Immediacy

**_Week 146 – Corbière, Man-at-Arms_**

 _Corbière's Journal_

 _Being a soldier, I admit, has its bad points._

 _It's all I've ever known, but there is precious little aside from hard work, boredom, and terror. The soldier's little comforts – looted liquor, stolen food, purchased love. I sometimes feel as if there's a banked fire in my heart, and every day it gets a little colder._

 _My legs hurt. My arms are tired. I have lost an eye and the little finger of my left hand, and cracked innumerable bones._

 _Bardiche said I should write a journal, so I am. I may be old, but I have an old man's vanity and I am susceptible to the charms of the young._

 _If I had a choice, I would like to be more like Rocque. She's hard and fast and dangerous, but there's something unspeakably sweet about that granny. She sewed my clothes up after that brigand gave me a slice. She gave me candy, if you can believe it._

 _I wonder if she is a grandmother? I should ask her. I have three children, but I don't know if any of them are parents. Been gone too long._

 _But I'm no less happy here than elsewhere._

 _Corbière_

* * *

 ** _Week 147a – Bardiche, Hellion_**

 _We know what happened to the Miller. In a manner of speaking._

 _I'm not sure I'll ever really understand. But he was there, burly and broken and sad, his body crumbling in front of my eyes. He looked so terribly alone._

 _But we've all got our problems, and he attacked us, so there was nothing for it._

 _That Dacre seemed a bit overzealous, I must say. Those Light-craving wenches tend to get odd, though. Especially in this place._

 _The Farmstead is a maze now. There are strange lights everywhere, and creatures like I've never seen, not even here._

 _I want to go back and see it again. Might as well kill monsters somewhere interesting. And if the Miller's wife is still alive I'd like to get her out._

 _Bardiche_

* * *

 ** _Week 147b – Dacre, Vestal_**

 _Dacre's Daybook_

 _Strange, strange! I ventured into the Farmstead with some stalwart, if ignorant, companions, and everything is strange._

 _The light shifts and batters my eyes, the constant growth, the twisting walkways through mirrored landscapes and uprooted wilderness. I walked through an ancient gallery torn from some elder castle and put my mace through the skulls of walking dead men; I walked through a blighted wood and breathed the scent of corruption tinged with a maddening color._

 _Scent of a color? I do not know how else to describe it. There is something in that heath that is not from this world, and I can hear it creeping through my skin calling me back._

 _I will study the scroll later. This is more immediate._

 _Dacre, srv. Tenebris._

* * *

 ** _Week 148a – Rache, Harlequin Jester_**

 _Sweet homecoming! I feel as if I've plunged myself into a luscious feather bed after sleeping on stones for months._

 _It's that exact same feeling, that silky sensation on my skin, the comfort and safety. I can't even describe it. Nothing has ever soothed my nerves like this since I went down in the dark with the clangorous gongs._

 _That color! It's like a cooling draught being poured through my eyes into my heart._

 _I wish I understood, but maybe it's better that I don't. All I know is that at last there is balance in my heart, two terrible centers of power exactly in tension, and I can sleep._

* * *

 ** _Week 148b – Elers, Jester_**

 _I'm still here, and apparently her Ladyship still likes my playing and my singing and jokes, because she's still paying me._

 _And there's the Courtyard._

 _I know I spoke unkindly of Dr. Bosc earlier, but really she's a fine sort, if you like being cut to ribbons and drained of your blood and then put back together. But hell, she can cure the Curse, so. . ._

 _It's a thrill of sorts now. Going to the Courtyard, dodging monsters, hunting for treasures and things they need at the Sanitarium for their little cures and experiments. Wondering who'll be the next to get the red disease. Wondering if it'll be me._

 _It lends spice to life, I have to admit._

 _Jacob Elers_


	22. Tantalizing Crystal

**Tantalizing Crystal**

* * *

 ** _Week 149 – Aljarhaa, Shieldbreaker_**

 _This struggle is endless, thank the One Prophet._

 _My arm rises and falls, my spear gleams red and streams with blood. My shield is battered and broken but my heart is strong._

 _The evil that rises in this place has consumed the evil that was in me, adding it to itself. I have seen serpents in the moonlight, but praise the Light they are no longer squirming in my soul._

 _Clarity is mine once more. I was a fool ever to trust the poison oracles, but I am here and my hand is strong against the beasts that haunt this land._

 _My soul has planted a banner here, and I stand beneath it and kill, and kill, and kill._

 _Halim Aljarhaa_

* * *

 ** _Week 150 – Dacre, Vestal_**

 _Dacre's Daybook_

 _I saw the thing from the stars again. Those melting, iron-hard crystals, the glimmering colors and the cloak of dead flesh. I think it has to wear those bodies like armor when it ventures out of the blasted heath into the saner confines of the outer world._

 _It has captured my imagination. I can't stop thinking about it. There is a deep and strange truth here, something to do with that comet that hit the Farmstead. It changed things in a way that I can't grasp except to say that there are laws from other realms intruding on this one. I think. . . I_ know _there is a mind and soul behind it._

 _I'm neglecting my prayers and my service. I haven't written back to the rest of the cultic circle in weeks. I need to_ know _this thing. I crave it in my bones and belly. The crystals are the key. There is a dust that can be refined from them. It stings and clarifies and opens the mind, and it has given me_ visions.

 _I've begun a great work, a chained and secret book of new prayers and new revelations. My brothers and sisters will call it heresy. The fools who worship the Light and its array of false gods will call it heathen witchery._

 _Let them. I have seen a new truth._

 _Dacre_

* * *

 ** _Week 151 – Bosc, Plague Doctor_**

 _All of the work I do, all of the experiments and examinations, the blood-letting and surgery, the hours of labor gathering the finest leeches and distilling the most potent healing elixirs, and how do they repay me?_

 _The first inexplicable mystical substance they come across, they eat. Or inject. Or take it like snuff._

 _I am utterly beside myself. Apparently it's not enough that I cured the Crimson Curse, now I must put my own studies aside and immediately take up the task of unraveling the secrets of the comet shards. Damn them all. I'll have to go to the Farmstead and examine the phenomena I've heard about first-hand._

 _Bosc, Dr. Md., physician._

* * *

 ** _Week 152a – Baldwin, Leper_**

 _My dearest wife,_

 _I dreamed of you last night. I thought I could smell the perfume of your silks, touch your hand, feel you close to me. I dreamed of your dark hair sparkling with silver._

 _Light in the darkness, my queen. I remember you and the sweet pain of that memory makes me strong._

 _Close by this Hamlet lies an ancient Farmstead. Something of elder terror has fallen to our world from the darkness between stars, and it has changed and shifted everything. There are lights and sounds and visions that no one can understand._

 _The old Miller who lived there has changed as well. Some of the others saw him before. He is crumbling into dust but stands tall, sad and lost as I am._

 _I saw his wife. She was sitting by a ruined fireplace holding a basket in her hands, broken and empty. When I spoke to her, she looked at me and said something I could not hear, and her body shattered into pieces._

 _It seemed to fit the surreal environs. I wish I knew what she had said. Was it a message for the poor Miller? A last request? A few words from a dirge for her damned husband?_

 _I am lost without you, my queen, my heart, my guiding star._

 _Light be with you._

 _Your Baldwin._

* * *

 ** _Week 152b – Bosc, Plague Doctor_**

 _I am somewhat taken aback._

 _I had anticipated a great deal of unpleasantness and anomalous behavior from the reports the others have given, but nothing they said could have prepared me for the alien environment of the blasted heath._

 _It is as if an entirely different set of laws pertains there. As if there is a tension between this world and all its earthbound inertia, and the visitor from outside._

 _I do not understand the purpose of the celestial array of stones surrounding the Farmstead, but I can leave the mystical side to Howard and his ilk. I do not know if Couer is up to the task. Perhaps he's been indulging in the fruits of the comet in addition to his powders and incense._

 _But regardless, I have samples, I have records, I have crystals and reagents and_ I have work to do!

 _Bosc, Dr. Md., physician._

* * *

 ** _Week 152c – Fortier, Raven Fiend Abomination_**

 _I went back to the Courtyard._

 _It's not that I want to be sick again. But there's something that draws me. Something about that smothering red light that seems to dull the pain of my own condition, that quiets the pull of the Weald and the things that roost there._

 _I don't know that I'll ever find out what happened to me. That's fine._

 _My name is Fortier. I am a woman. I am human._


	23. Downwards

**Downwards**

* * *

 _ **Week 158 – The Heiress**_

Wilhelmina Constantine von W-, Heiress and Lady of the Hamlet: Her Diary.

 _I've had parties out for the past month, hunting that monstrous thing that's been haunting my lands. All they've found is dead things, ruination, and those crystals._

 _Couer is back at work. He avoids Howard, but I don't give a damn as long as they get things done. I'm using too much labor destroying the crystals, and I'm concerned about their effect on the workforce._

 _I've asked Howard to keep an eye on him. He's been acting increasingly erratically over the past year._

 _The last thing I need is a mad occultist in addition to a mad plague doctor._

 _Lady W., Heiress._

* * *

 _ **Week 159 – Berners, Grave Robber**_

 _Dear Diary,_

 _Once more unto the Weald, I suppose._

 _I never wanted to go back there. It reminds me of Pevrel too much. His campaigns, his plans and strategies, his shield between me and the monsters. Camping with him. Damn it._

 _I'm ruining your pages, Diary. I have to stop._

 _I thought this would have faded and gone. Damn it. Damn it._

 _Signed, Berners._

* * *

 _ **Week 160 – Medley, Vestal**_

 _Dear Diary,_

 _I praise the Light and Her kindness, Her fire and flame that fills my heart, Her strength that strengthens me to the task ahead._

 _I have been trying. I give them Her blessings and prayer, I give them service and kindness in Her name, and they do not listen. It is difficult, but I carry on. My vows demand it, my soul sings that it is righteous and just to tell them of the truth. The only ones who have hearkened are the sisters of the Sanitarium, and some of the tavern girls. They sit, and listen, and talk with me. It is a blessing in this thankless task._

 _Disappointments and frustration aside, there is work in plenty here. I have spoken long with Aljarhaa, the Eastern snake-sorceress, and learned something of her past and her curse. I never blamed her for the serpents, and I see that I was right in that. There was a demon at her throat, but I see in her eyes and her walk that its grip is loosened._

 _I am grateful for that. She is a good woman and did not deserve that evil._

 _Medley, in service to the True Light and Her Glory._

* * *

 _ **Week 161a – Rache, Harlequin Jester**_

 _I don't understand anything._

 _There was peace, for a while. I went to the Farmstead and gazed on the lights and heard the odd chimes and half-real words, and there was a great movement in my heart and a power that stood equally with the memories of what I heard under the Manor._

 _I was standing between two deadly sleeping gods, perfectly in tension, and I felt sane for a few weeks._

 _Humans weren't made for that. I am cracking. Thorel wants to tell me to write, to talk, to share. I'll write, but no one will ever read it. I'll keep it locked safe like that book Dacre thinks no one knows about._

 _I'm splitting in half, from the top of my head to the tips of my toes._

 _And Couer smiles at me like a snake. He knows something._

* * *

 _ **Week 161b – Audrey, Grave Robber**_

 _Dear Diary,_

 _At least there's absinthe. It doesn't exactly help you forget, but damn'd if it doesn't take the edge off._

 _Poise. All my life I've worked for poise, and now the poise that matters is my balance and precision as I sling a pickaxe through the skull of a monster._

 _I haven't properly danced in. . . years, maybe? Gods help us._

 _Berners told me that early on, they couldn't even get consistent shipments of liquor. Praise every single ray of the Light that I don't have to worry about_ that _, at least._

 _Audrey._


	24. Glittering Dark

**Glittering Dark**

* * *

 ** _Week 162 – Bosc, Plague Doctor_**

 _I feel as if I slept once, and three months vanished._

 _The work! I haven't known my work to consume me like this since my days at the university. It is a delicious obsession, not that any of the officious fools who shunned me will ever feel anything like it._

 _The sisters at the Sanitarium must be missing me. None of them knows how to make a tonic properly unpleasant. The healing's one thing, but it's just as important to teach the patient not to make the same damn fool decisions a second time, and there's nothing so good for that as vile medicine._

 _It also works better. They expect it to taste bad, and it helps the healing process if they feel it's working._

 _There is something very, very different about the Farmstead now. I wrote before that it was as if different laws were at work. That, I believe, is the difference between the blasted heath with its crop of diseases and strange growth, and the Courtyard with its vampires and Curse._ Those _seemed to follow no law at all. The crystal infection, now – that follows laws that I can study properly!_

 _I've begun work on a new distillation, a concoction of extraordinary potency that will be ready for its first testing in a matter of days._

 _My fingers are tingling with anticipation._

 _Bosc, Dr. Md., physician._

* * *

 ** _Week 163 – Thorel, Abomination_**

 _There are no unmixed blessings. I of all people know that. No light without shadow, no joy without suffering._

 _The crystals are spreading. I am physically powerful, even in my own body, and I go with the work crews and hack them to pieces and cart them back to the Farmstead. Have to make sure the men are careful about the shards and splinters. There is something otherwordly about them. They are not healthy._

 _Dr. Bosc could be an ally, but she is consumed with her experiments and I believe she does not see the danger in the crystals. But the Heiress does, and so we work._

 _I haven't had to let it out in almost a year. That is indeed a blessing, but a hard one. There is a kind of release in it._

 _Nothing is ever easy._

 _Licinius Thorel, Dr. Theol., Dr. Md._

* * *

 ** _Week 164 – Somneri, Vestal_**

 _We are not the children of the Light. We are not its chosen people._

 _I am dead and alive. I died. I was torn to pieces by beasts in the wood. I remember blood gushing from my throat. I remember Raoullin's sword slashing through them too late._

 _I am alive. I saw a strange light in my mind's eye, glittering between the stars. I saw it slice through sunlight and down into the world, brighter than a hundred clustered stars, sickening and exhilarating, and I saw it plunge like a spear into the planet._

 _We are not the children of the Light. There are no gods of Light, only a thousand thousand thousand unhuman things moving in the void between vision and invisibility._

 _The Light is real, and its power rests in my hand and heart. The thing on the scroll is real, and it courses through my blood and makes my insides quiver and pulse. The thing beneath the manor is real. The deadly Sleeper in the comet is real._

 _I was dead, and I am alive. What am I to do now? Who gave me this new breath? Was it just a whim?_

 _Raoullin is dead. I must find the profane scroll and read its secrets. I must know._

 _Somneri._

* * *

 ** _Week 165 – Dacre, Vestal_**

 _Dacre's Daybook_

 _I am being punished for my heresy, I know. My brothers and sisters, the fellow acolytes of the great, dark Thing beneath the earth – they have sensed my faltering, they know my crimes against our god, and they have sent this red evil to scourge me._

 _Let them! I can withstand this curse, the crimson obscenity in my veins, the craving and madness! I will write still._

 _Blood drops from my lips onto the pages of my book, smearing the heretical passages I have penned, but the great truth shines through. There is a light that burns brighter than the Light and harsher than the infinite harshness of the Thing. Ever-changing and unchangeable, ever-growing and ever-living, an eternal glory and a luscious lustrous majesty._

 _The crystals gave me truth and visions, and how can I do other than write them down?_

 _I will let them cure me. I will submit to the bleeding and tinctures and I will spit in the eye of my cultic companions._

 _Dacre._

* * *

 ** _Week 166 – Corbière, Man-at-Arms_**

 _Corbière's Journal_

 _I wonder what the things in the Warrens are, really. Where they're from._

 _You hear stories about the old lord and his debaucheries and magical experiments, but I don't know. It seems like they've been down there an awfully long time._

 _There's a lot about this place that I don't understand. Some of it reminds me of the crusades, fighting alongside the holy warriors against the armies of the East. There were strange things in those lands, too. Cities of serpent-worshippers, nests of demonologists and secret caves inhabited by cults I can put no name to._

 _I should write a book about that. Maybe Bardiche will help me get started._

 _Corbière_


	25. Strange Glories

**Strange Glories**

* * *

 ** _Week 167 – Bosc, Plague Doctor_**

 _It works better than I had ever hoped._

 _The crystals themselves are not truly necessary for my purposes, I have found. There are other aspects of the comet's influence – vectors for the diseases that have crept out of the Farmstead. The grey rot that saps the muscles as it hardens the body, the sky taint that attacks the mind with feverish dreams and thins the blood to let other illnesses in._

 _It's taken longer than I expected to get the mixtures correct, lengthened by my caution in shielding myself from the materials I must work with, but I have it now. An ashen distillation, a clear and sparkling blue in color, with crystals constantly precipitating and re-dissolving. I sometimes sit and watch it, striving for understanding that seems just slightly out of reach._

 _That's maudlin, though. In practical terms, it empowers my acids and my blighting concoctions, and holding it – perhaps the vapors – provides a marvelous speeding of the limbs. I find myself reacting more quickly than I had thought possible. Perhaps it's simply the thrill of discovery?_

 _I should celebrate. Perhaps Dismas has contracted another disease for me to cure._

 _Bosc, Dr. Md., physician._

* * *

 ** _Week 168 – Gwenllian, Hellion_**

 _I am reading the Vestals' old books and copying things, and I am learning more. There are stories about old wars and grudges and sacrifices that are much more interesting than I had expected._

 _Von Kalmbach scoffs at some of the things Ecouland has me copy and tells me to write poetry instead._

 _I want to get better. My heart sings like a lioness when I fight, and I want to write how it makes me feel. I want to put it down here where it will not disappear._

 _I translated the name of my spear and had the Blacksmith carve it into her metal. In this language it is "Joyful Leaper." It sounds strange that way but I like it._

 _Soon I will write here a poem about Gwenllian and Von Kalmbach and how we slaughtered every beast that rose against us, and I will sing it to him and watch his face turn red and laugh at him._

* * *

 ** _Week 169 – Ecouland, Vestal_**

 _I am a candle in the hand of the gods. They breathe, and I flicker._

 _It has been over two years since I delved into the deeps beneath the manor. I still wake up shuddering and sweating, thinking of the things I saw and heard. The gongs that drove Rache mad._

 _Somneri and Rache were both dead, I am certain, and now they are both alive. I do not understand. The gods laugh at us, and the Light hides itself._

 _Somneri refuses to talk about it, but I've heard her talking to herself as she writes. She still believes, but there is a deep and hysterical well of heresy in her heart now._

 _Heresy. . . Somneri, Medley the Travesian. I have grave doubts about Dacre, with her chained book and her instinctive blasphemies._

 _I wish Raoullin was alive. His faith was like a tower, a castle whose gates break the enemy's charge._

 _The gods and angels are not the Light. The Fire and Flame are aspects of its glory. The gods. . . there are demons and fallen angels. We have always known there are malignant things hiding in the dark. Perhaps these are other gods._

 _Perhaps Somneri's mutterings are right, and we are surrounded by an infinity of strange gods, and the Light is only one of them._

 _Be that as it may. The Light is my guide and protector. It has wrapped me in warmth and given me strength to prevail, and I will serve it and sing its praises all of my days._

Ave Lux, Ave sancti Luminis, Ave Lumen quod purificat.

 _Ecouland, srv. Lux._

* * *

 ** _Week 170 – Bardiche, Hellion_**

 _I talked with Baldwin. He told me that he'd met the Miller's wife, and that she was just as broken-down, cursed and crumbling as the Miller himself._

 _I had always thought that's how it would be, but it's rough to hear it for sure. Poor woman. Imagine that, the victim of poor crops, her land stolen by the old Lord, and now her humanity shattered by something evil from the stars._

 _Maybe evil isn't the word. I don't know if it's malicious. But it's certainly not healthy for humans._

 _I talked Corbière into writing a journal. I want to interview him about some of his old campaigns. I think he served in at least one of the crusades, I know he was talking about Eastern serpent cults._

 _I have served in many lands, but never as far East as him, and there are strange things out there under foreign suns._

"Foreign Suns." _That would be a good name for the book. Maybe_ "Foreign Suns: A Warrior Remembers His Campaigns."

 _That's an exciting thought!_

 _Bardiche_

* * *

 ** _Week 171 – Rache, Harlequin Jester_**

 _I saw a reflection of myself in a crystal today, or possibly yesterday, and I'm almost certain that underneath the greasepaint there was only a skull._

 _Is that so different, though? I look at my face in a mirror. There's a layer of paint, a layer of skin, a bit of fat or muscle, and there's the bone. It's not too deep under. You could almost touch it. Reach out and smear away the paint and skin and meat and there it is, white and gleaming._

 _I smashed the crystal with my foot and felt stronger. I don't understand it all._

 _Bosc told me to give detailed reports on all the strange things that happened in the Farmstead, but I'm keeping it locked away right here in my book._

 _I told Thorel, though. I couldn't help myself. And we talked._

 _I'm going to go with him next time he goes to help the workers keeping crystals out of the environs. He helps me feel a little more sane. He was right, writing helps._

 _Fortier told me that the Courtyard murk helps her feel better about her monster. I thought the Farmstead was going to be that for me. But it's not._


	26. Challenging Visions

**Challenging Visions**

* * *

 ** _Week 172a – Dismas, Highwayman_**

 _Fecking hell, this business just gets worse and worse._

 _Worse. . . That's not true. It's never been as bad as beneath the manor. But damn'd if it isn't trying its best to get close._

 _Those crystals are everywhere. I go on a mission to the Ruins, and there's some gigantic horror from the blasted heath slashing me to pieces and breathing those wretched crystals all over me. Have to pluck them out right away, or they start to grow. No wonder the Heiress is so all-fired enthusiastic about getting work gangs to break them apart._

 _And Bosc's got her nose in a book or poked into some strange-smelling experiment every second. She doesn't sleep much lately. She's too excited._

 _To tell the truth it's a bit attractive, really. She. . . I don't want to say_ raves _exactly. Or_ gloats. _But something like that. She's got a new toy and she's having a devilish good time with it._

 _It's better than when it was the Curse, anyways. A successful experiment always puts some fire in her blood, and there wasn't much success with that._

 _Dismas._

* * *

 ** _Week 172b – Bosc, Plague Doctor_**

 _Thorel has been hard at work among the crystal-breakers, and he has brought back a wealth of carefully-gathered information about their interactions with the normal world._

 _Perhaps "normal" isn't quite accurate, but it will serve._

 _The crystals grow, but they wither and fade if they are too far from the others. It does not appear to be related to their size. Rather, a single great crystal will die, while many lesser ones together survive. The creatures of the comet, likewise, cannot venture forth alone – or if they do, it must be in some monstrous combination with things of this world. Strange!_

 _I am tantalized by this. It hints at properties that could be of great use. Even now I have discovered a procedure by which the crystals may in time become fixed, unchanging, and their beneficent properties made use of as I have in my ashen distillation._

 _This is a stepping-stone into realms of the chemister's art I never imagined._

 _Bosc, Dr. Md., physician._

* * *

 ** _Week 173 – Dacre, Vestal_**

 _There is a war going on between invisible gods_

 _I've seen it in the crystal visions_

 _The thing of earth and flesh_

 _and the thing of comet crystal_

 _The sleeper and the thing in the earth_

 _I can see a star falling like lightning piercing my eye and mind_

* * *

 ** _Later_**

* * *

 _Dacre's Daybook_

 _I must keep this book locked away from myself when I am in a visionary trance. The crystals bring wondrous sights and deep insight, but clarity comes only with consideration of those sights and sensations. I cannot simply let it flow through my fingers onto the page._

 _The profane scroll has disappeared, and I find that I do not care how, or why, or anything. It carried its own secrets, but they were petty and small things compared to the Sleeper._

 _I must return to the Farmstead. There is so much to learn._

 _Dacre._

* * *

 ** _Week 174 – The Heiress_**

Wilhelmina Constantine von W-, Heiress and Lady of the Hamlet: Her Diary.

 _Everything in this damnable Hamlet of mine seems to move in circles, and with each spin of the wheel it becomes more and more clogged with evil and disease._

 _There was the darkness beneath the manor, and it sent its madness back into the Hamlet with each party that entered it. The Courtyard and its contagion, which still crops up, and now the comet and those maddeningly strange crystals._

 _Everything evil sends its fingers into my land and each leaves an ineradicable trace on it and on me._

 _Laudanum helps me sleep, but I dream regardless. I keep seeing the stone man in the Courtyard, but his head is the head of my Ancestor's statue._

 _I should have that damned thing torn down._

 _Lady W., Heiress._

* * *

 ** _Week 175 – Gwenllian, Hellion_**

 _Cry Gwenllian! My own name on my tongue_

 _My spear, heart-seeking, springs out before me_

 _I am a lioness, a war-dog drenched in blood_

 _A storm was my father, the warm earth my mother_

 **[numerous scribbled-out lines]**

* * *

 ** _Later_**

* * *

 _This is harder than I thought it would be._

 _Poetry does not come so easy to me in this language. I can't feel the thump and rhythm of the words the way I do in my mother tongue. It all sounds wrong._

 _This is frustrating. But I do not back down from challenges!_

 _Gwenllian will prevail._


	27. Bitter and Sweet

**_Bitter and Sweet_**

* * *

 ** _Week 176 – Couer, Occultist_**

 _I do not know if I should do this._

 _I have had everything prepared for weeks, months. I have worked with all of my extraordinary talent upon the crystals, and I have made breakthroughs, great leaps in my knowledge and understanding._

 _But now, looking at the enchanted vial, at the liquid crystal droplets within it, I shudder and hesitate._

 _I have been watching Dacre. She is by no means equipped for the effect the crystals have on the mind, and I have slipped quietly close and listened to her half-suppressed babbling when she is drunk on the shard dust._

 _Part of me craves that opening of the mind, but part of me fears it. And that leaden inertia that has weighed me down for years now saps the strength from my hand when I might otherwise have used the droplets, let them fall upon my eyes and open them thrice over to gaze into the infinite void._

 _I know what Howard would counsel me, and that tastes of gall in my mouth. Fool. And that ignorant wretch Bosc, playing with her sciences. She's stumbled upon some successes by sheer accident, I'm sure, and preens herself like a raven._

 _I should leave this place but I am bound here by shackles of lead and by the knowledge that the only thing that moves my heart any more is the scraps of arcana that I can glean from all this eldritch madness._

 _I do not know what to do._

 _Nouh ibn Abdolreza_

* * *

 ** _Week 177 – Montacute, Musketeer_**

 _Dear sir or madam,_

 _I trust this letter will arrive safely. I am in receipt of your communication of last year, and while I am less than pleased at the time it took to find me, I understand given my habitual peregrinations._

 _I am pleased to learn that the university will pay for the expenses of my dear cousin Craon's funeral, as there were certain expenditures that I, as her kinswoman, am apparently expected to make good. Please remit the sum noted on the enclosed detail list, in addition to my cousin's accumulated and undisbursed stipend, addressed to the Hamlet care of Mlle. Montacute. More detailed directions are included on the list._

 _I remain yours truly,_

 _Monday Montacute._

* * *

 _Dear Charles,_

 _I believe I've secured the funding required for our next project. The administrators at Craon's university are apparently as naive as our late "cousin" herself, and I believe they'll be so happy that Craon's family isn't taking them to the Court of Chancery for their role in sending her off to her death that they'll pay almost anything I ask, as long as I make it seem reasonable enough._

 _I expect a considerable remittance shortly, with which I'm sure we'll be able to acquire the necessary manpower and supplies for our expedition. Until then, I'm whiling away my time killing savage beasts for the Heiress of this squalid Hamlet._

 _She was close to Craon, so I'll have to steer clear of her lest she inquire too closely about our purported family ties._

 _Your loving sister,_

 _Monday._

* * *

 ** _Week 178 – Loucelles, Leper_**

 _No luck so far._

 _It's been half a year, or thereabouts, and no luck. Lots of strange diseases come and go here, and there's lots of work curing them all, but this thing eating me from the skin in to the bone? There is nothing._

 _I've submitted to every experiment the doctor has pressed upon me. I have taken every tonic, smeared myself with every salve, performed each task religiously, and I am not made whole. Perhaps the comet holds the key. There have been curatives prepared from its crystal, but none work for me._

 _Each time, each new attempt, my bitter resignation wars with my almost-dead hope. They've steeped together in my heart for so long that I do not even know how I would feel if I was indeed cured._

 _My sword, my body, the strength that remains in my limbs, all are in service of this one goal: To fight and kill and remain here alive until there is a cure._

 _Loucelles._

* * *

 ** _Week 179 – Rache, Harlequin Jester_**

 _I helped break down some crystal formations near the Weald a few days ago. They're really quite lovely. And the sound they make when you crash into them with a pick! It's amazing. It reminds me of breaking down those pig-shrines in the Warrens._

 _The pieces seem to stick in your skin, so we all wear cloth hoods and gloves and try not to get them on us. Thorel is insistent on this point, and he knows a great deal about such things. Besides, it's easier to humor him._

 _After a while I got tired of the smashing and just played my lute for the workers, which they seemed to appreciate. It made a sort of melody with the sound of crystals breaking, and I think I must have drifted off after a while._

 _Was it the music that helped? I didn't have any strange dreams, not that I remembered. I just woke up with the sound of tinkling crystal in my head and Thorel looking oddly at me._

 _The way the sound sticks in my head, it reminds me of the gongs in the dark._

* * *

 ** _Week 180 – Bosc, Plague Doctor_**

 _I am beginning to believe that Couer has a death wish, and I am resolved not to let him include me in it._

 _I had undertaken an expedition to the Cove to recover various important and interesting antiques from a wrecked ship. There is no better testing ground for the efficacy of a weapon than a battle, and my ashen distillation is, I am glad to say, most effective._

 _Naturally, Couer had his own more mystical experiments, and in a fit of professional courtesy I acquiesced to our traveling in darkness to the sound of his whispered spells._

 _We were set upon by the great, terrible creature I have heard Aljarhaa speak of, the thing that killed Picvini and Lynom. Am I surprised that Couer's sorcerous mumblings had such a result? I am not. Or at least, I should not have been._

 _In hindsight, that man is far too unstable for me to willingly risk my neck adventuring with him again._

 _All went well, though, and we sent the thing howling away through the void, or wherever we were. And we recovered a peculiar idol that I find most intriguing, so it was not a total loss._

 _I'll have a hard time restraining Dismas if he ever hears of it, though._

 _Bosc, Dr. Md., physician._


	28. The Sleeper Stirs

**The Sleeper Stirs**

* * *

 _ **Week 181 – Thorel, Abomination**_

 _Went to the Farmstead again. Rache was going with Dacre and Iris. Don't really trust either of them and I wanted to be there to keep her steady._

 _I do not know if it is really wise. Dacre is missing. There was something big moving in the lights, something I couldn't really see. It stirred and watched and there were waves of strange radiance and strange sensations. I felt like it was. . . sleeping, or something like it._

 _Dacre just walked off into the shifting colors. We couldn't stay after that. Sleeping gods are not healthy for mortals._

 _I'm going to talk with Dr. Bosc again. She's been too hard at work not to know something. We need to figure some of this out._

 _Maybe Couer, too. He's a learned man and I know he's studying the comet._

 _I don't know what I can do to help._

 _Licinius Thorel, Dr. Theol., Dr. Md._

* * *

 _ **Week 182a – Fitzrolf, Musketeer**_

 _The Diary of Emmanuelle Fitzrolf_

 _I haven't been able to hunt down that strange monster in the purple void again. I've been told that some of the others found it a few weeks ago. While I am passionately jealous, I have been able to console myself with my other hunts._

 _I am not used to seeking sea-beasts, with the exception of one journey far to the north to harpoon the great whales, but the creatures of the Cove are different. They don't lurk under the waves, breaching occasionally. No, they come up and have at you! I have collected a new scar across my belly, just above my right hipbone, from a great crab-thing dangling with rotting ropes and ship-tackle – I presume from ships it had destroyed in the past._

 _I cannot describe the sweet clarity of that moment, the exhilaration and crystallizing terror. It was delicious._

 _I am well enough to leave, and there is an expedition to the Warrens planned to hunt down the dreadful thing from the stars that has been spreading the comet's contagion throughout the Hamlet's surrounds. I am going with them. I cannot wait._

 _Fitzrolf_

* * *

 _ **Week 182b – Aljarhaa, Shieldbreaker**_

 _There is truly no end to the creatures that infest this land._

 _It is fascinating, in its way. I have long been used to the spawn of sorcery and to the demons of the desert, but there is a profusion of evil life here that baffles me. How could such a small land bear so much wicked fruit?_

 _We delved into the Warrens to hunt down the thing from the stars and put an end to its crystal-sowing. We succeeded, but it was a close thing. I think it is getting stronger._

 _And there was the stranger in yellow. That tall, tall thing with its caged skull and its ghastly body of severed heads. There's something pathetically human about him that sickens me. It is as if he is subject to an awful compulsion, the plaything of horrible gods._

 _I wonder, if we could nail him to this plane and cut away all those heads, if we would find his true body? I wonder if he dreams, if he was drawn here just as I was in the hopes of his curse being lifted?_

 _Halim Aljarhaa._

* * *

 _ **Week 183 – Pettiloup, Falconer**_

 _Gods above and sinners here below, I'm tired of this._

 _I counted it up, and I've been here for two years. Two years of killing monsters for gold and thinking about the Vvulf and being infected by vampires and killing more monsters._

 _What is the point? What really is the point? I'm getting less young every day. I'm scarred and sharp-faced and I like birds better than people, and I'm never going to have a happy little home. Not that I really wanted one, I guess._

 _I've been talking with Jean a lot, that wild woman who lives in a tent outside the city. She seems mostly happy. Trains people, hunts, does whatever she does with Bellecote when she isn't training or hunting, doesn't get into trouble or have to go fight beasts in tunnels._

 _Maybe there's another Hamlet out there that needs a Survivalist._

 _Pettiloup._

* * *

 _ **Week 184 – Fortier, Raven Fiend Abomination**_

 _The Hamlet is growing sick again._

 _It's like the Crimson Curse. People go out and are touched by some strange evil; they return, and it spreads like tainted water poured on cloth._

 _I suppose it is the same as me. Something changed me and now I am here, drawn as if there was a fishhook in my heart pulling me._

 _Bosc will never cure me. The tonics and salves derived from the comet do nothing. The Light hides itself from me. Can I be at peace with all this?_

 _My mouth hurts. My eyes feel wrong._

 _Rache is not well. But her body is strong and she is not indulging in the shard dust, not like some of the others._

 _I wish I could comfort her, but there is no medicine for the injury she has taken._

 _My name is Fortier. I am a woman. I am human._


	29. And Stirring, Dreams

**. . .And Stirring, Dreams**

* * *

 ** _Week 185 – Dacre, Vestal_**

 _Dacre's Daybook_

 _I have seen the sleeper in the crystal and my soul is not my own._

 _I looked into a mirror and the mirror looked back at me. I submitted myself to the comet's dust and I can see it gleaming behind my eyes. The spreading, melting, shining crystals sing to me._

 _I begged the Abbot for a cell and prayed for days, prostrating myself before a crystal altar, consuming the dust until I thought I would die if I took more, and now I am clean._

 _Dacre is sloughed away. My skin is armor that protects my crystal soul, and my soul is the sleeper's and its soul is mine._

* * *

 ** _Week 186 – Corbière, Man-at-Arms_**

 _Corbière's Journal_

 _We had to go down through the Warrens again to steal back food. The swine have been sufficiently chastised that they've mostly stopped stealing humans, but there are still raids, little tests of our will. So we raid back and let them know that we're still paying attention._

 _The Heiress's pet heretic Maynet came with us this time. He and his little twin Iris don't fit in with the rest of us hired killers, nor really with each other. They're thick as thieves in town, but they refuse to go on expeditions together. Some nonsense about burdens._

 _It's all one. They're unsettling but undoubtedly useful, and I'm too old to worry about getting blood on my clothes._

 _I don't exactly understand it. Maynet's not a sorcerer and he's certainly no priest or alchemist, so I don't know how he heals you, but he does. Come to think of it, I suppose the crusaders aren't priests, either._

 _It's beyond me, and that's just fine. I'll sit in the firelight while Rocque knits and smoke and talk about my old campaigns with Bardiche as she writes._

 _Corbière_

* * *

 ** _Week 187 – Hue, Highwaywoman_**

 _Can't believe I'm still here, honestly. I don't even know why I stayed. My only friend is dead and while the money is excellent and there aren't any lawmen after me –_

 _Actually, I just answered my own question._

 _Two of the other dead ones are back. That's fecking insane but this whole place is insane._

 _I'm not waiting here for Picvini to pop out of the ground. But it would be good to see him again._

 _I should sneak into the Farmstead and check around. Things are funny there, and folks only started coming back after the comet hit._

 _Hue._

* * *

 ** _Week 188a – Bardiche, Hellion_**

 _All things considered, this is going fairly well._

 _The Farmstead is still skin-crawling. The way those lights shift and alter, it makes me nauseous. But we go in, we put down the creatures crawling around, we gather crystals for experiments and try to make sure nothing inside gets out._

 _I keep running out of paper and ink. Corbière is absolutely full of stories, and I've been getting some from Rocque as well. She's from the distant East, even farther than Corbière's ever been, and she's lived a long, strange life._

 _She says there are shapeshifting devils in her land that eat people's livers to become human. I wonder if that's the same thing as the Crimson Curse? Or something like it? I need to ask her more about it, but she's always so busy._

 _And I have my hands full with_ "Foreign Suns."

 _Bardiche_

* * *

 ** _Week 188b – The Heiress_**

Wilhelmina Constantine von W-, Heiress and Lady of the Hamlet: Her Diary.

 _I woke up a few minutes ago with Ancestor's pistol loaded in my hand._

 _Frankly I am disgusted with myself. Am I to be so shaken by dreams? By the monsters that crawl in this land? I think not!_

 _I am growing increasingly suspicious of some kind of evil spiritual influence, quite possibly the result of my Ancestor's arcane meddling, and I refuse to be the victim of it._

 _I've sent a servant for Howard and some of the Vestals to provide me with occult and sacred protection, and I am removing as many of that fellow's possessions from my immediate vicinity as I can._

 _The other avenue of exploration must be the comet. I am going to accompany the next expedition I send into the Farmstead._

 _I_ will _get to the bottom of this._

 _Lady W., Heiress._


End file.
